Review of Serious Energy Games : Objectives, Approaches, Applications, Data Integration, and Performance Assessment

In recent years, serious energy games (SEGs) garnered increasing attention as an innovative and effective approach to tackling energy-related challenges. This review delves into the multifaceted landscape of SEG, specifically focusing on their wide-ranging applications in various contexts. The study investigates potential enhancements in user engagement achieved through integrating social connections, personalization, and data integration. Among the main challenges identified, previous studies overlooked the full potential of serious games in addressing emerging needs in energy systems, opting for oversimplified approaches. Further, these studies exhibit limited scalability and constrained generalizability, which poses challenges in applying their findings to larger energy systems and diverse scenarios. By incorporating lessons learned from prior experiences, this review aims to propel the development of SEG toward more innovative and impactful directions. It is firmly believed that positive behavior changes among individuals can be effectively encouraged by using SEG

Typologies and Features of Play in Mobile Games for Mental Wellbeing

Background: The smartphone market is saturated with apps and games purporting to promote mental wellness. There has been a significant number of studies assessing the impact of these digital interventions. Motivation. The majority of review papers solely focussed on the impact of strict rules and award systems of the apps. There is comparatively little attention paid to other game techniques designed to encourage creativity, a lusory attitude, and playful experiences. Results. This gap is addressed in this paper in a consideration and analysis of a purposive selection of six mobile games marketed for wellbeing, our focus is on both external and internal motivations that these games offer. Our specific interest is how these games balance rule-based play with creativity. We find that ludic play is a highly-structured, rule-bound, goal-oriented play, in contrast to paedic play which a freeform, imaginative, and expressive. We argue that while ludic play is purposed towards the promotion of habit formation and generates feelings of accomplishment, it nonetheless relies heavily on extrinsic motivation to incentivise engagement. By contrast, paidic play, specifically role-playing, improvisation, and the imaginative co-creation of fictional game worlds, can be used effectively in these games to facilitate self-regulation, self-distancing, and therefore provides intrinsically-motivated engagement. In the context of games for mental wellbeing, ludic play challenges players to complete therapeutic exercises, while paidic play offers a welcoming refuge from real world pressures and the opportunity to try on alternate selves. Conclusion: Our intention is not to value paidic play over ludic play, but to consider how these two play modalities can complement and counterbalance each other to generate more effective engagement

Coziness in Games: Second Homes, Audiences and Aesthetics

Coziness in games is a concept that has recently emerged in contemporary game culture and has been adopted by games of various genres to create different paces and intensities of gaming. This paper seeks to understand what the role of coziness is in contemporary games and how it is articulated in terms of design, modality, and poetics. We aim to understand how it is formed and make a case for acknowledging and accounting for coziness in the broader context of game culture. We ask: what signifies coziness? How is it integral game design? What functions does it serve? Where does it originate? We conclude that forms of coziness are diverse and that it integrates very differently with the gameplay of diverse genres and for dissimilar target audiences; we argue therefore that coziness can be regarded as integral to game design across the broad range of games and should therefore not just be regarded as a single genre

Typologies and features of play in mobile games for mental wellbeing

Background: the smartphone market is saturated with apps and games purporting to promote mental wellness. There has been a significant number of studies assessing the impact of these digital interventions.Motivation: the majority of review papers solely focussed on the impact of strict rules and award systems of the apps. There is comparatively little attention paid to other game techniques designed to encourage creativity, a lusory attitude, and playful experiences.Results: this gap is addressed in this paper in a consideration and analysis of a purposive selection of six mobile games marketed for wellbeing, our focus is on both external and internal motivations that these games offer. Our specific interest is how these games balance rule-based play with creativity. We find that ludic play is a highly-structured, rule-bound, goal-oriented play, in contrast to paedic play which a freeform, imaginative, and expressive. We argue that while ludic play is purposed towards the promotion of habit formation and generates feelings of accomplishment, it nonetheless relies heavily on extrinsic motivation to incentivise engagement. By contrast, paidic play, specifically role-playing, improvisation, and the imaginative co-creation of fictional game worlds, can be used effectively in these games to facilitate self-regulation, self-distancing, and therefore provides intrinsically-motivated engagement. In the context of games for mental wellbeing, ludic play challenges players to complete therapeutic exercises, while paidic play offers a welcoming refuge from real world pressures and the opportunity to try on alternate selves.Conclusion: our intention is not to value paidic play over ludic play, but to consider how these two play modalities can complement and counterbalance each other to generate more effective engagement