title: Serious Games for Health: Features, Challenges, Next Steps.
abstract: As articles in this journal have demonstrated over the past 3 years, serious game development continues to flourish as a vehicle for formal and informal health education. How best to characterize a "serious" game remains somewhat elusive in the literature. Many researchers and practitioners view serious games as capitalizing on computer technology and state-of-the-art video graphics as an enjoyable means by which to provide and promote instruction and training, or to facilitate attitude change among its players. We invited four distinguished researchers and practitioners to further discuss with us how they view the characteristics of serious games for health, how those characteristics differ from those for academic purposes, the challenges posed for serious game development among players of different ages, and next steps for the development and empirical examination of the effectiveness of serious games for players' psychological and physical well-being.
authors.affiliation: 1 Division of Psychological & Educational Services, Fordham University , New York.
authors.forename: Moderators Fran C
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Blumberg
authors.affiliation: 1 Division of Psychological & Educational Services, Fordham University , New York.
authors.forename: Lauren C
authors.initials: LC
authors.lastname: Burke
authors.affiliation: 2 Epic Games , Cary, North Carolina.
authors.forename: Participants Celia
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Hodent
authors.affiliation: 3 North Carolina State University , Raleigh, North Carolina.
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Evans
authors.affiliation: 4 University of Southern California , Los Angeles, California.
authors.forename: H Chad
authors.initials: HC
authors.lastname: Lane
authors.affiliation: 5 Carnegie Mellon University , Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.|6 CEO , Schell Games, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
authors.forename: Jesse
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Schell