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:

Nabil Zary, MD, PhD, Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Science, Dubai, UAE


Impact Factor 3.36

JMIR Serious Games (JSG, ISSN 2291-9279; Impact Factor 3.36) 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.

While JSG 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.

In 2022, JMIR Serious Games received a Journal Impact Factor™ of 3.36 (5-Year Journal Impact Factor™: 4.30) (Source: Journal Citation Reports™ from Clarivate, 2022). The journal is indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central, DOAJ, Scopus, SCIE (Clarivate), and PsycINFO.

Recent Articles

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Reviews

Games and game components have become a major trend in the realm of digital health research and practice as they are assumed to foster behavior change and thereby improve patient-reported and clinical outcomes for patients with type 2 diabetes.

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Games for Cognitive Assessment

Cognitive assessment using tangible objects can measure fine motor and hand-eye coordination skills along with other cognitive domains. Administering such tests is often expensive, labor-intensive, and error prone owing to manual recording and potential subjectivity. Automating the administration and scoring processes can address these difficulties while reducing time and cost. e-Cube is a new vision-based, computerized cognitive assessment tool that integrates computational measures of play complexity and item generators to enable automated and adaptive testing. The e-Cube games use a set of cubes, and the system tracks the movements and locations of these cubes as manipulated by the player.

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Serious Games for Health and Medicine

There is serious concern over the annual increase in depressive symptoms among millennials in Bangkok, Thailand. Their daily routine revolves around the use of their smartphones for work and leisure. Although accessibility to mental health care is expanding, it cannot keep up with the demand for mental health treatment. Outside Thailand, multiple projects and studies have attempted to merge gamification mechanisms and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to create mobile health intervention apps and serious games with positive feedback. This presents an opportunity to explore the same approach in Thailand.

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Exergames, Active Games and Gamification of Physical Activity

Despite growing evidence showing the effects of exercise and cognitive trainings on enhancing attention, little is known about the combined effects of exergame on attention in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Exergame, a form of exercise using a video game, has both cognitive stimulation and physical activity components and has been shown to improve cognitive function in children.

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Serious Games for Health and Medicine

Depression is a debilitating mental health disorder, with a large treatment gap. Recent years have seen a surge in digital interventions to bridge this treatment gap. Most of these interventions are based on computerized cognitive behavioral therapy. Despite the efficacy of computerized cognitive behavioral therapy–based interventions, their uptake is low and dropout rates are high. Cognitive bias modification (CBM) paradigms provide a complementary approach to digital interventions for depression. However, interventions based on CBM paradigms have been reported to be repetitive and boring.

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Serious Games for Health and Medicine

Currently, many central auditory processing disorder screening tests are available for children, and serious games (SGs) are frequently used as a tool for the diagnosis of different neural deficits and disorders in health care. However, it has not been possible to find a proposal that unifies both ideas. In addition, the validation and improvement of SGs, in general, does not take into account the player-game interaction, thus omitting valuable information about the playability and usability of the game.

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Games for Pain Management

Exercise is effective for musculoskeletal pain. However, physical, social, and environmental factors make it difficult for older adults to persist in exercising. Exergaming is a new pathway that combines exercise with gameplay and may be helpful for older adults to overcome these difficulties and engage in regular exercise.

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Game Design and Efficacy of Game Elements

Design dynamics that evolve during a designer’s prototyping process encapsulate important insights about the way the designer is using his or her knowledge, creativity, and reflective thinking. Nevertheless, the capturing of such dynamics is not always an easy task, as they are built through alternations between the self–first and self–third person views.

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Serious Games for Health and Medicine

Compared with traditional approaches, gaming strategies are promising interventions for the treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We developed a serious game, The Secret Trail of Moon (TSTM), for ADHD treatment.

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Games for Cognitive Assessment

Serious games have the potential to transform the field of cognitive assessment. The use of serious game–based cognitive assessments in prison environments is particularly exciting. This is because interventions are urgently needed to address the rapid increase in the number of currently incarcerated older adults globally and because of the heightened risks of dementia and cognitive decline present in this population. Game-based assessments are assumed to be fun, engaging, and suitable alternatives to traditional cognitive testing, but these assumptions remain mostly untested in older adults. This is especially true for older adults in prison, whose preferences and needs are seldom heard and may deviate from those previously captured in studies on cognition and serious games.

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Games for Rehabilitation

While vestibular rehabilitation with virtual reality (VR) is becoming more popular every day, the disadvantages of this method are not yet clear.

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Preprints Open for Peer-Review

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