Serious Gaming for Behaviour Change: A Systematic Review

Over the years, there has been a significant increase in the adoption of game-based interventions for behaviour change associated with many fields such as health, education, and psychology. This is due to the significance of the players’ intrinsic motivation that is naturally generated when playing games and the substantial impact they can have on players. Many review papers measure the effectiveness of the use of gaming on behaviour change; however, these studies neglect the game features involved in the game design process, which have an impact on stimulating such changes. Therefore, this paper aims to identify game design mechanics and features that are reported to commonly influence behaviour change during and/or after interventions. This paper identified key theories of behaviour change that inform the game design process, providing insights that can be adopted by game designers for informing considerations on the use of game features for moderating behaviour in their own games