BACKGROUND: Physical activity (PA) is important for children with a chronic disease. Serious games may be useful to promote PA levels among these children.OBJECTIVE: The primary purpose of this systematic review was to evaluate the effectiveness of serious games on PA levels in children with a chronic disease.METHODS: PubMed, EMBASE, PsycINFO, ERIC, Cochrane Library, and CINAHL were systematically searched for articles published from January 1990 to May 2018. Both randomized controlled trials and controlled clinical trials were included to examine the effects of serious games on PA levels in children with a chronic disease. Two investigators independently assessed the intervention, methods, and methodological quality in all articles using the Cochrane risk of bias tool. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed.RESULTS: This systematic review included 9 randomized controlled trials (886 participants). In 2 of the studies, significant between-group differences in PA levels in favor of the intervention group were reported. The meta-analysis on PA levels showed a nonsignificant effect on moderate to vigorous PA (measured in minutes per day) between the intervention and control groups (standardized mean difference 0.30, 95% CI -0.15 to 0.75, P=.19). The analysis of body composition resulted in significantly greater reductions in BMI in the intervention group (standardized mean difference -0.24, 95% CI -0.45 to 0.04, P=.02).CONCLUSIONS: This review does not support the hypothesis that serious games improve PA levels in children with a chronic disease. The meta-analysis on body composition showed positive intervention effects with significantly greater reductions in BMI in favor of the intervention group. A high percentage of nonuse was identified in the study of serious games, and little attention was paid to behavior change theories and specific theoretical approaches to enhance PA in serious games. Small sample sizes, large variability between intervention designs, and limited details about the interventions were the main limitations. Future research should determine which strategies enhance the effectiveness of serious games, possibly by incorporating behavior change techniques.
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The author presents the methodological backgrounds and underlying research design of an on-going scientific research project concerned with the scientific evaluation of serious games and/or computer-based simulation-games (SG) for advanced learning. The main questions of this research project are: 1. what are the requirements and design principles for a comprehensive social-scientific methodology for the evaluation of SG? 2. To what extend does SG contribute to advanced learning? 3. What factors contribute to, or determine this learning? 4. To what extend and under what conditions can SGbased learning be transferred to the real world (RW)? Between 2004 and 2012, several hundreds of SG-sessions in the Netherlands with twelve different SG were evaluated systematically, uniformly and quantitatively to give a data-set of 2100 respondents in higher education and in work-organizations. The author presents the research model, the quasi-experimental design and evaluation instruments. This focus in this article is on methodology and data-set to establish a proper foundation for forthcoming publications on empirical results.
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The authors analyze the policy discourse on the utility of games for society at the level of the European Union, and for five EU countries, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Norway. The ongoing study is part of a Research Roadmap developed within the GALA Network of Excellence on Serious Games (2010-2014, EU FP7). The authors identify four policy discourses on the utility of serious games that they label as Technology Enhanced Learning; Creative Innovation; Social Inclusion and Empowerment and Complex Systems. The polcies applicable to SGs in the five European countries are briely described and compared. It was seen that some countries have explicit policies for SGs (the Netherlands, Germany); whereas most of the countries only have implicit policies not directly addressing SGs but which can be used to support SGs development and use.
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