Preface

摘要

As games technologies have become more and more widely available, the ability of games to engage users effectively in specific, designed activities has been seized as an opportunity to use computer games for purposes beyond recreation. Since the term 'serious games' was comprehensively defined in 2002, they have been used as tools to gives individuals a novel way to interact with games in order to promote physical activities, to learn skills and knowledge, to support social or emotional development, to treat different types of psychological and physical disorders, to generate awareness, and to advertize and promote in application areas such as engineering, education and training, competence development, healthcare, military, advertizing, city planning, production, and crisis response to name just a few. Many recent studies have identified the benefits of using videogames for a variety of serious purposes.