David et al. (2020) Serious games and promoting mental health

David, O. A., Costescu, C., Cardos, R., & Mogoaşe, C. (2020). How Effective are Serious Games for Promoting Mental Health and Health Behavioral Change in Children and Adolescents? A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Child & Youth Care Forum, 49(6), 817–838. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-020-09566-1

David et al. (2020) aimed their research towards the issue of psychopathology in children and adolescents. Unlike the previously mentioned article in the last blog post, this article is aimed towards the use of technology and serious video games which is defined in the article as ‘therapeutic games… entertaining games with non-entertainment goals… to facilitate the implementation of therapeutic interventions’ (David et al., 2020, p. 818).

The article does not mention the intended audience, but as the article it is published in is the Child and Youth Care forum, it can be implied that it is for Child psychologists.

 

Purpose	Examine the effect of serious games on promoting mental health in adolescents and children
Methodology	Literature search between 1990 and January 2018. 135 articles were chosen            They computer an effect size for comparison between groups playing the serious games and the control group. Study was used as a unit of analysis.
Results	For most serious video games there was a positive effect on adolescents and children mental health. The type of game did not change the effect score, but the game length did.
Conclusion	Serious games are not yet ready for standalone treatment/prevention

    A study performed by Wols et al. (2020) focused on whether ‘motivation to change, emotion mindset, and stress mindset influenced the choice for and engagement with, a game promoted as a mental health game’ they found that motivation to change and mindsets did not influence game choice, but people who chose the mental health trailer had a decrease in the belief that stress was debilitating (Wols et al., 2020). Whilst the video game itself did not improve the mental health of people playing it to a significant amount, promoting the game as a mental health game explicitly. It suggests that there is a potential for video games to promote mental health explicitly. An article by Poppelaars et al (2018) does not support this finding that explicit mental health messages had lower autonomy, less options, and limited freedom of choice. This relates to David et al.’s article as the game was not able to be used as a standalone treatment for mental health issues.      

    The article by David et al. (2020) suggests that video games aimed towards mental health issues are not yet ready to be used as treatment/prevention of mental health issues. This article was chosen as students have been shown to play video games and having video games aimed towards mental health issues rather than causing them intentionally or unintentionally.