Systematic Review about Serious Games

Orientação: Ângela LeiteComputer games play a big role in people’s life nowadays, since the video games industry was created it has attracted not only children and adolescents’ interest but also adults. When speaking of a serious (computer) game, we mean that the objective of the computer game is not to entertain the player, which would be an added value, but to use the entertaining quality for training, education, health, public policy, and strategic communication objectives. Psychology plays an important part connecting biological, cognitive and social sciences (Boyle, E., Connolly, T., & Hainey, T., 2011). Nowadays, serious games are used in various domains such as training, education, advertising, medical field and communication. The idea is that games could be used for more serious purposes such as education, simulating real world phenomenon and relations in the world, increasing life quality through health, rehabilitation and therapy applications or raising interest to the problems in our global world (Szczesna, Tomaszek & Wieteska, 2012). This paper aims to do a systematic review about serious games that are related to psychology since 2010 until now. The methodology of this paper is based on a systematic review about serious games, using articles and books. There are used 29 articles and 9 books to obtain any information about serious games being used in the psychology field. This shows there are a lot of serious games being used in different psychological pathologies. It is shown that serious games used in psychotherapeutic interventions are effective