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Serious Video Games: Tools for Learning, Training and Health: Comparison
Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Vicky Zhou and Version 1 by Caroline Hands.

Serious video games are digital games designed for purposes beyond entertainment, typically to support education, training, health interventions, or behaviour change. They combine game mechanics with psychological and pedagogical principles, such as feedback, repetition, goal-setting, and scaffolding, to create interactive environments that facilitate learning, skill development, and sustained engagement. In many cases, they are built to simulate realistic tasks or decision contexts, allowing users to practise skills, test strategies, and learn from consequences in a low-risk setting. Within cyberpsychology, serious video games are particularly valuable because they provide structured digital contexts for examining how technology shapes cognition, emotion, motivation, and behaviour. They enable researchers and practitioners to observe how users respond to digital rewards, challenges, social features, and immersive environments, as well as how these features influence outcomes such as self-efficacy, persistence, attention, and emotion regulation. As a result, serious video games operate at the intersection of psychological theory, human–technology interaction, and applied digital intervention design. This entry provides an overview of their development, theoretical foundations, applications, effectiveness, and associated ethical considerations.

  • serious games
  • cyberpsychology
  • education
  • mental health
  • behaviour change
  • motivation
  • learning technologies
Serious video games are digital games developed for purposes beyond entertainment, typically to support learning, training, health, or behaviour change across domains such as education, healthcare, defence, cybersecurity, and public policy. The term was introduced by Clark Abt in the 1970s to describe games designed with explicit educational or social objectives rather than amusement alone. Zyda later refined this definition, describing serious video games as a mental contest played according to specific rules that uses entertainment to advance training, education, health, public policy, and strategic communication goals [1].
Their interactive and rule-governed structure makes them particularly suited to contexts requiring skill development, decision-making, and applied problem solving. Within cyberpsychology, which examines how digital technologies shape cognition, emotion, and behaviour, serious video games provide structured environments in which motivation, learning processes, and emotional regulation can be both studied and applied. This entry situates serious video games within cyberpsychology, traces their historical development, outlines their psychological foundations, reviews key application areas, evaluates evidence of effectiveness, and considers ethical and future directions.

References

  1. Zyda, M. From visual simulation to virtual reality to games. Computer 2005, 38, 25–32.
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