  Citation: Hammady, R.; Arnab, S. Serious Gaming for Behaviour Change: A Systematic Review. Information 2022, 13, 142. https:// doi.org/10.3390/info13030142 Academic Editor: Gabriele Gianini Received: 17 November 2021 Accepted: 19 January 2022 Published: 8 March 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). information Review Serious Gaming for Behaviour Change: A Systematic Review Ramy Hammady 1,2, * and Sylvester Arnab 3 1 School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK 2 Faculty of Applied Arts, Helwan University, Giza 11795, Egypt 3 Disruptive Media Learning Lab at Coventry University, Coventry CV1 5DD, UK; aa8110@coventry.ac.uk * Correspondence: ramy.hammady@solent.ac.uk or ramy_hammady@a-arts.helwan.edu.eg or r.hammady@essex.ac.uk; Tel.: +44-7503663334 Abstract: Over the years, there has been a significant increase in the adoption of game-based inter- ventions for behaviour change associated with many fields such as health, education, and psychology. This is due to the significance of the players’ intrinsic motivation that is naturally generated to play games and the substantial impact they can have on players. Many review papers measure the effectiveness of the use of gaming on changing behaviours; however, these studies neglect the game features involved in the game design process, which have an impact of stimulating behaviour change. Therefore, this paper aimed to identify game design mechanics and features that are reported to commonly influence behaviour change during and/or after the interventions. This paper identified key theories of behaviour change that inform the game design process, providing insights that can be adopted by game designers for informing considerations on the use of game features for moderating behaviour in their own games. Keywords: behaviour change; game design; serious gaming; gamification; review 1. Introduction In the last four decades, games have been designed purposely for behavioural change [1,2]. This is due to their popularity in providing leisure activity and entertainment to players [3]. Researchers exploited the appeal of playing games to influence players’ behaviours after witnessing significant behaviour changes while playing [3–5]. Since then, specific games have been particularly created and developed to help transform and change certain be- haviours in different fields such as health, psychology, education, marketing, and tourism, etc. [6,7]. New terms have emerged to define these types of games such as: serious gaming, gamification, persuasive games, etc. Designing a persuasive game for serious purposes requires a thorough understanding of the relevant behaviour change theories that can feed into the design process [5]. Games that have been employed to make an impact on players’ behaviours are often aided by well-known behavioural change theories and the engaging characteristics of game design elements and mechanics. This manuscript therefore aimed to review and synthesise existing studies on these types of games and their effectiveness/efficacy, the behavioural change theories that are frequently adopted, and the game elements and mechanics utilised to structure these games. This will provide insights into the most frequently applied game elements in these games. This review specifically focused on computer and video games and gamified systems that apply game elements. The next sections describe terminologies associated to the game types covered by the studies discussed in the paper, which will provide rationale to the systematic review for investigating existing studies associated with games for behaviour change. 1.1. Serious Games & Gamification Serious games (SG) are defined as “interactive computer applications, with or without a significant hardware component, that have challenging goals, are fun to play and engag- ing, incorporate some scoring mechanism, and supply the user with skills, knowledge or Information 2022, 13, 142. https://doi.org/10.3390/info13030142 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information