JMIR Serious Games

A multidisciplinary journal on gaming and gamification including simulation and immersive virtual reality for health education/promotion, teaching, medicine, rehabilitation, and social change.

Editor-in-Chief:

Gunther Eysenbach, MD, MPH, FACMI, Founding Editor and Publisher; Adjunct Professor, School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria, Canada


Impact Factor 4.1 CiteScore 8.6

JMIR Serious Games (JSG, ISSN 2291-9279; Impact Factor 4.1) is a multidisciplinary journal devoted to computer, web, virtual reality, mobile applications, and other emerging technologies that incorporate elements of gaming, gamification or novel hardware platforms such as virtual reality devices or wearables. The journal focuses on the use of this technology to solve serious problems such as health behavior change, physical exercise promotion (exergaming), medical rehabilitation, diagnosis and treatment of psychological/psychiatric disorders, medical education, health promotion, teaching and education (game-based learning), and social change. JSG also invites commentary and research in the fields of video game violence and video game addiction.

The journal is indexed in PubMedPubMed CentralDOAJScopusSCIE (Clarivate), and PsycINFO.

While JMIR Serious Games maintains a strong focus on health, the journal also aims to highlight research exploring serious games in health-adjacent and other interdisciplinary contexts, including but not limited to military, education, industry, and workplace applications.

JMIR Serious Games received a Journal Impact Factor of 4.1 (ranked Q1 #26/185 journals in the category Health Care Sciences & Services; Q1 Public, Environmental & Occupational Health #50/419, Journal Citation Reports 2025 from Clarivate).

JMIR Serious Games received a Scopus CiteScore of 8.6 (2024), placing it in the 97th percentile (#4 of 165) as a Q1 journal in the field of Rehabilitation.

Recent Articles

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Serious Games for Health and Medicine

The digital therapy of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) based on a “self-adaptive multitasking training paradigm” has been developed to improve the cognitive functional impairments and attention deficits of children with ADHD. However, the efficacy and safety of such treatment for Chinese patients remain untested.

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Games for Cognitive Assessment

Memory suppression transiently disrupts hippocampal activity, leading to suppression-induced forgetting (SIF), especially for negative stimuli. However, traditional paradigms like Think/No-Think rely on explicit control and lack ecological validity. This study introduces a game-based task that implicitly elicits suppression through reversed motor mappings, providing a naturalistic approach to studying memory inhibition.

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Serious Games for Health and Medicine

Unrelenting pressure and an “always-on” culture can leave no time for genuine rest among young adults. While playing video games has been noted to afford cognitive escapism and relaxation, critical questions remain about the influence of popular video games, such as Super Mario Bros., and their potential effects on young adults’ burnout risk.

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Serious Games for Health and Medicine

Amblyopia, a leading cause of preventable childhood blindness, often remains inadequately addressed by traditional treatment methods such as refractive correction and occlusion therapy, which can be non-interactive and lead to poor adherence.

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Gamification

People with cancer often experience stress. Digital health interventions (DHIs) can help individuals increase momentary relaxation. Breeze is a gamified breathing training that can be embedded into DHIs. Its effectiveness in controlled cross-sectional studies has been demonstrated. However, adherence to Breeze and its effect on momentary relaxation in longitudinal interventional studies has yet to be investigated.

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Exergames, Active Games and Gamification of Physical Activity

Hong Kong faces a rapidly aging population, with many older adults not meeting recommended physical-activity levels and struggling to maintain long-term exercise adherence. Exergaming offers an accessible, technology-supported way to promote health conditions while providing immediate feedback and task variability among older adults.

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Exergames, Active Games and Gamification of Physical Activity

Physical inactivity is a major public health issue among college students, often exacerbated by academic pressures and lifestyle shifts. Traditional exercise interventions often face challenges with adherence due to low motivation and engagement. Immersive virtual reality (VR)–based exercise interventions may address these barriers by providing interactive and motivating experiences, yet empirical evidence regarding their psychological and physiological benefits remains scarce.

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Game Development

Exergames have emerged as effective interventions for promoting physical activity and preventing type 2 diabetes (T2D). Kinect-based exergames have demonstrated improvements in exercise adherence and health outcomes, but their high cost and reliance on specialized hardware hinder widespread home-based adoption. Recent advances in computer vision now enable monocular-camera-based systems, offering a potentially cost-effective and scalable alternative for promoting physical activity at home.

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Usability of Games and Gamification

Immersive virtual reality-assisted therapy (VRT) is a relational therapy for distressing voices in psychosis. Like AVATAR therapy (AT), VRT centres on therapist-facilitated dialogues with a digital avatar representing a voice. Unlike AT, VRT employs immersive virtual reality (VR). While participant experiences of AT have been explored, therapist perspectives remain unexamined, and for VRT, neither participant nor therapist experiences have been studied. Understanding these perspectives is essential to inform optimization of therapy, future research, and implementation.

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Game Addiction and Other Unintended Consequences

Background: Internet gaming disorder (IGD) causes neurocognitive deficits and brain dysfunction. Traditional interventions require specialists and incur high costs, while progressive aerobic training (PAT) seems more practical. But its effect on IGD and the underlying neural mechanism remains unclear.

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Games for Medical Education and Training

Staff working in residential care homes (RCHs) have played a significant role in preventing the spread of infection among residents, visitors, and staff. Providing continuous professional training to the staff is essential. Current infection control training mostly rests on short educational talks or one-to-one reminders in the RCHs. A blended mode of online interactive games and face-to-face consultations was now proposed as a new way to conduct infection control training in the RCHs.

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