JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Depression and anxiety in children and adolescents are a major health problem worldwide. In recent years, serious game research has advanced in the development of tools to address these mental health conditions. However, there is not an extensive analysis of these experiences, their tendencies and capacities.

Objective:

This review aims to compile the most current serious games, published from 2015 to 2020, with a new approach focusing on its applications: awareness, prevention, detection and therapy. The purpose is also to analyze the implementation, development and evaluation of these tools to obtain trends, strengths and weaknesses for future research lines.

Methods:

The identification of the serious games through literature search was conducted on many databases. The identified records were screened to only include the manuscripts following these points: a serious game for personal computer, smartphone or virtual reality; developed by research teams; serving only depression or anxiety; aiming specifically at children or adolescents.

Results:

34 publications have been found that develop serious games for personal computer, smartphone and virtual reality devices and which are tested with children and adolescents. Most of the games address both conditions and are applied in prevention and therapy. Nevertheless, there is a trend that anxiety is more treated in childhood and depression in adolescence. Regarding design, the game genres are chosen in this order: arcade minigames, adventure worlds and social simulations. For its implementation, these serious games usually require sessions of 1 hour and are played using a personal computer most often. Moreover, the common evaluation tools are normalized questionnaires that measure acquisition of skills or reduction of symptoms. Most articles collect and compare these data before and after the participants play.

Conclusions:

The results show that more awareness and detection games are needed, as well as games that mix these 4 applications. Besides, both mental conditions should equally target all age ranges. For future research, the development and evaluation of serious games should be standardized, so the implementation of serious games as tools would advance. The experiences should always offer support while playing, besides of collecting participants behavior during the game to better analyze their learning. Furthermore, there is an open line regarding the use of virtual reality for these experiences due to the capabilities offered by this technology.