Two years ago I weighed 330 pounds. That’s just shy of 150 kilograms, if you’re not using Freedom Units. On August 7 my scale showed 229.4 pounds (104 kilos). While that’s by no means slim for a 5-foot-10 man, and I intend to lose more, I think it’s fair to say I’m now closer to “chunky” than obese. And a small but meaningful part of that weight loss is thanks to a VR game.
Since I know a lot of you are scanning this article and just want me to get to the point: It’s Ragnarock. That’s the VR game. You can buy it on Steam, the Meta Quest Store, or the PlayStation Store. There are demos to try out on all platforms. Now stick around if you want the details.
How I got here
I’m not going to lie to you. Though I enjoy it immensely, a virtual reality headset is not a magic device that will cause you to lose weight. The success of any weight loss plan depends on a diet of fewer calories than those you burn. No matter how much you exercise or build muscle, you can’t escape that thermodynamic requirement.
And I haven’t. I’ve been dieting pretty dramatically since the start of this year, and that’s where the lion’s share — or perhaps the rabbit’s share? — of my improvement has come from. As any nutritionist will tell you, “you can’t outrun a bad diet.”
Me in July 2022 and August 2024.
Me in July 2022 and August 2024.
Michael Crider/Foundry
Me in July 2022 and August 2024.
Michael Crider/Foundry
<div class="scrim" style="background-color: #fff" aria-hidden="true"></div>
</div></figure><p class="imageCredit">Michael Crider/Foundry</p></div>But exercising can certainly contribute to that goal, and help you build muscle and endurance while you’re doing it. Unfortunately, I’m rather limited in what exercises I can do because of sciatica, a condition I’ve been carefully managing for over a decade. It’s why I’m such a big proponent of standing desks, incidentally, and it means that I can’t lift most weights, and I can’t do a lot of physically intense sports. I can’t even jog without risking debilitating back pain for days at a time.
And I’ve always struggled with exercising just for exercising’s sake. Sitting on a machine for an hour and going nowhere is something I find extremely tedious. So even those aerobic machines that don’t put any stress on my back — walking on a treadmill, rowing, stationary bikes — tend to leave me bored and discouraged.
Exercising without ‘exercising’
When I started working for PCWorld, I was invited to participate in a company-wide event called Walktober. Despite being almost entirely sedentary, my competitive nature was sparked, and I found myself invested in the outcome of my small team. Suddenly walking in circles for more than an hour a day wasn’t self-improvement. It was competition, hitting the same buttons in my brain as a competitive video game.
<div class="lightbox-image-container foundry-lightbox"><div class="extendedBlock-wrapper block-coreImage undefined"><figure class="wp-block-image size-large enlarged-image"><img decoding="async" data-wp-bind--src="selectors.core.image.enlargedImgSrc" data-wp-style--object-fit="selectors.core.image.lightboxObjectFit" src="" alt="walking in sneakers" class="wp-image-2431203" width="1200" height="675" loading="lazy" /></figure><a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-in-black-sneakers-walking-on-street-1153838/" target="_blank" class="imageCredit" rel="noopener">Jens Mahnke/Pexels</a></div> </div></figure><a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-in-black-sneakers-walking-on-street-1153838/" target="_blank" class="imageCredit" rel="noopener">Jens Mahnke/Pexels</a></div>But I live in Pennsylvania, which is often dark, wet, and cold in October. So at the end of a long day, and with only a couple of hours to get in another 7,000 steps while the rain poured outside, I searched for an alternative. “Steps” here is used in a loose sense — the Walktober website would count any kind of exercise recorded by my fitness tracker into an approximation of steps, whether or not I was actually walking or running.
And so I looked to my Quest 2 headset. I’d bought it on sale earlier that year, more or less as a means of spicing up my Skyrim runs with virtual reality, and getting some hands-on experience so I could write about it. But I found that actually swinging my arms to stab Nordic zombies could wear me out after a while…and there were “exercise” apps all over the Meta store. They all seemed to have a bit of that “Wii workout game” feel to me, but there was one demo I tried that had me huffing and puffing.
If I could ‘gamify’ a workout, why not add a workout to a game?
If I could “gamify” a workout with just a little context added by my coworkers, why not add a workout context to a game that fits into the category? I wondered how many “steps” I could rack up, approximated by my arm motions and heart rate as measured by Fitbit, while playing in virtual reality. I set my Fitbit to track an Aerobics workout — the closest approximation I could get to just waving my arms around — and started up Ragnarock.
Like Guitar Hero and Whack-A-Mole in Valhalla
Ragnarock shares a lot of DNA with the console rhythm games of the 2000s — think Guitar Hero and Rock Band. It has that same basic setup, except you’re swinging motion controllers instead of pressing buttons on a plastic guitar. As the runes come down the screen, you beat the drums in time with the beat. The closer you are to the beat, the faster your longboat Vikings will row.
Imagine Guitar Hero, plus whack-a-mole, all set to Nordic heavy metal.
That’s about it as far as game mechanics go. If you can get a few dozen hits in a row without missing, you’ll charge up a power meter. Smash the shields on the side of the screen — or more accurately, to the side of the virtual space you’re inhabiting — and you’ll electrify your rowers with the lightning of the Norse gods to make them row even faster. (Don’t worry, they’re into it.) If you save up your charge and go farther without missing, you can give them a super-power lightning boost.
If trying to beat your best score (expressed in the distance your rowers go) gets old, you can go online and participate in multiplayer “races,” as every player gets their own boat and rows to the same song. There are dozens of songs in the base game, but you can get more via DLC (again, very similar to those old rhythm games) or load up custom-created songs made by the game’s enthusiastic community.
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