The acceptability of serious games for the management of mental health: A brief review of published work

Video gaming has become a recreational staple for a global audience (Shafer & Carbonara, 2015), transforming the experience of leisure into an engaging virtual activity which was only exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic (López-Cabarcos et al., 2020). The psychological impact of video gaming has been explored through a variety of lenses, with addiction (André et al., 2020; Aarseth et al., 2017), aggression (Burkhardt & Lenhard, 2022), social interaction (Arbeau et al., 2020; Kowert & Oldmeadow, 2015), and exergames (video games that require the player to physically interact with the game to play it; Halbrook et al., 2019) becoming some of the most academically examined categories. However, a growing body of work has focused on the use of the ‘serious game’ (Deterding et al., 2011), which generally provides more educational or behaviour change-focused experiences rather than purely entertainment-based experiences associated with commercial off-the-shelf games (COTS; Connolly et al., 2012).