An Overview of Serious Games

TLDR

Serious games are rapidly expanding both as an industry and an academic field, yet existing surveys tend to focus on specific domains such as education or health. This paper aims to conduct a comprehensive survey of digital serious games across all application areas. The authors review literature from education, well‑being, advertising, cultural heritage, interpersonal communication, and health care, and propose a taxonomy to classify these games. The study offers design guidelines for successful serious games and outlines future research directions.

Abstract

Serious games are growing rapidly as a gaming industry as well as a field of academic research. There are many surveys in the field of digital serious games; however, most surveys are specific to a particular area such as education or health. So far, there has been little work done to survey digital serious games in general, which is the main goal of this paper. Hence, we discuss relevant work on serious games in different application areas including education, well-being, advertisement, cultural heritage, interpersonal communication, and health care. We also propose a taxonomy for digital serious games, and we suggest a classification of reviewed serious games applications from the literature against the defined taxonomy. Finally, the paper provides guidelines, drawn from the literature, for the design and development of successful serious games, as well as discussing research perspectives in this domain.