You can lead a recumbenteer to water but you can't make them drink it
You had me thinking that maybe people are actually doing that now but I wasn't certain.
A number of years ago, they came out with a video game called
The Sims. I got sucked into playing it for a short while until I realized that it was a huge time-waster. I was creating wonderful "lives" for these fake people while my real-life obligations were suffering.
Still, I thought it was a shame that these virtual worlds weren't somehow connected to achieving real world results. It's through the actions of playing that young children actually learn. Then when they're older, they get shipped off to schools where
learning becomes
work, and their creativity is actually diminished as a side effect.
I know they've come out with lots of other Sim-like games over the years but I don't think anyone has even tried to have them interface with actual learning, exercise, money management, business development etc. as a part of playing in the virtual world as much as I've imagined possible.
Think about it. Instead of just typing in a user name and password, what if we also had to pedal a certain distance in order to access the Cruzbike forum. Just like any social visit, we gotta travel a little in order to go there and hang out. What if certain bicycle component retailers had shopping access within the Zwift world and customers had to pedal over there in order to shop online?
The real world businesses could, say, make a deal with Zwift that customers coming in online by pedaling in the Zwift world get a certain discount off of the usual price, and doing so could attract more cyclists to playing Zwift? I'm not sure how Zwift is set up, but you got me thinking that maybe they've already done something just like that, where people have to pedal between places on the maps or tracks or whatever in order to do certain things and participate in activities.
