The Spread and Impact of Game Innovations: A Systematic Review of Academic and Applied Domains

Games Research and Practice · 2025-12-15

The use of digital game technologies beyond entertainment has evolved from a niche practice to a well-established area of applied innovation [Sawyer and Rejeski 2002 ; Future Market Insights 2023 ]. Understanding these impacts is important for professionals in entertainment technology—researchers, teachers, students, developers, and policy makers—who, perhaps unknowingly, contribute to activities in other sectors. This systematic review investigates the use and impact of game technologies beyond entertainment to assess how the field contributes to other sectors through both its original innovations and those it has catalyzed and advanced. Across the publications analyzed, educational and applied games account for most documented cases, reflecting their prominence within academic discourse. We review academic research articles, book chapters, news coverage, and other published accounts to develop a broad picture of how game innovations spread—from first-order impacts, in which commercial entertainment games are leveraged toward non-entertainment ends in areas such as education, science visualization, and health; to second-order contributions, in which technologies and design innovations (e.g., game engines, leaderboards, and occlusion-culling techniques) created for games are applied in non-game contexts; to tertiary contributions, where the games industry has catalyzed advances such as temporal anti-aliasing, scalable server architectures, and joystick design now used widely elsewhere. The review characterizes how video-game design elements and technologies have enhanced diverse fields, the relative degree of contribution across domains, and emergent themes. While the distribution of work mirrors the weighting of academic research toward educational and applied contexts, it also reveals broader technological and social impacts extending beyond those traditions. By focusing on published reports, this review moves beyond claims about potential to document the demonstrated, cross-sector contributions of game technologies outside entertainment.

Meditating Together: Practices, Benefits and Challenges of Meditation on Social Virtual Reality

2025-04-24 · 6 citations

Generative Dreams: Rethinking GenAI Design Through a Community-based Approach with Recently Incarcerated, Gang Affiliated, and At-risk Young Adults at a Trauma Informed Arts Center

2025-04-23 · 3 citations

Introduction to Videogames and the Extremist Ecosystem

2024-01-04 · 3 citations

This chapter provides a broad overview of videogames and their player communities with an eye toward those aspects that bear on the patterns of extremist activity we see today. It introduces videogames, their definition and defining elements, the issue of violence, key industry stakeholders in their development, and discusses the centrality of rules and systems to games, on the one hand, and player action, reaction, and interpretation, on the other. It also examines the nature of game communities, including what we know about player demographics, their varying motivations for play, the structural features that game communities have in common, and how extremists exploit them. The chapter then considers games as social platforms, including both online games and online game-adjacent platforms, and compares and contrasts them to other traditional social platforms.

Engaging recently incarcerated and gang affiliated Black and Latino/a young adults in designing social collocated applications for mixed reality smart glasses through community-based participatory design workshops.

2024-05-11 · 6 citations

Involving Black and Latina/o communities early and often in emerging technology design can make innovation more democratic, address bias, and reduce harm against these marginalized groups. To the best of our knowledge, no work has examined how recently incarcerated and gang affiliated young adults conceptualize mixed reality (MR) use for social collocated scenarios based on their everyday interactions and meaning-making. To explore this topic, we used a design-based implementation research (DBIR) and community-based participatory design (CBPD) approach to elicit social-technical insights grounded in the personal and critical perspectives of these youth. We find participants frequently grounded design ideas as embodied design elements to surface intangible and invisible qualities such as emotions and reflections on lived experiences, namely criticizing institutional structures that have maintained exclusionary practices against them. We discuss how DBIR and CBPD can uncover larger societal issues impacting marginalized communities through emerging technology design, and we contribute design recommendations for social collocated interactions in MR.

Casual Games, Cognition, and Play across the Lifespan: A Critical Synthesis

Games Research and Practice · 2023-05-05 · 1 citations

Games, including video games have long been associated with both rhetorics of progress and frivolity, simultaneously recruiting efforts to employ games toward furthering cognitive skills, while also eliciting concerns about the decadence of players. Casual games, defined as games with a low barrier to entry and quick play sessions often focus on cognitively-oriented challenges and are perceived by many players to promote cognitive, social, and emotional benefits. Research on the cognitive, social, and emotional impact of casual games now spans games marketed as entertainment, “brain games,” and digital therapeutics; despite these games sharing similar qualities, the bodies of research literature on them remains largely distinct. This review finds little support for the cognitive benefits of playing casual games, with exception of the elderly or those with dementia. This research synthesis finds evidence for the social and emotional benefits of casual games when they are sought for these purposes, played mindfully, and within robust social contexts. However, the same games, when played in different contexts can have negative consequences, consistent with findings from the mindset literature more broadly. Researchers thus should take seriously the context of game play, perhaps treating the emergent phenomena of play as the unit of analysis, rather than the media artifact.

Gaming in Educational Contexts

2023-09-12 · 5 citations

Design is particularly important for researchers investigating the relative contribution of specific game characteristics on learning. The digital nature of games makes possible isolation of testable variables based on the release and assessment of multiple versions of a given title that include or exclude key features for evaluation of effects. Science games can immerse players in models that lead to embodied understandings that serve as a solid foundation for later, more formalized understandings and representations. Educational games in computer science is an emerging area, fueled by the algorithmic nature of games and their long history of embedded programming and design modification features. Within certain genres, the game play itself reflects forms of computational thinking as players consider quantitative evidence, experience, and the second order effects of underlying rule systems, and changes to such rules can enhance computational thinking. The rise of collegiate esports scholarships for players is also bound to impact secondary education and relationships between games and educational institutions.

Right-Wing Extremism in Mainstream Games: A Review of the Literature

Games and Culture · 2023 · 30 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Sociology

Hate speech, harassment, and an increasing prevalence of right-wing extremism in online game spaces are of growing concern in the United States. Understanding trends in how and to what extent extremist groups utilize online gaming spaces is vital in taking action to protect players. To synthesize the current state of extant research and suggest future directions, we conduct a systematic review of the literature on right-wing extremism in videogames. We detail our search protocol, selection criteria, and analysis of the collected work, and then summarize the findings. Important themes include how and why extremists’ targeting of online game communities began, the role of Gamergate in this process, and the industry and market context in which such activities emerged. We describe the current nature of the problem, with extremist language and ideology providing a kind of on-ramp for radicalizing disenfranchised gamers. We conclude with a summary of responses from industry and legislators.

Enhancing Youth Self-Regulation Through Wearable Apps: Increasing Usage Through Participatory Design in Low Income Youth

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · 2022-10-29 · 9 citations

Managing attention, progressing towards goals, and monitoring behaviors are elements of self-regulation (SR). SR applications based on contemplative practices such as breath counting have demonstrated gains in field studies but have failed to engage youth without coercion. Prior research generated behavioral and neurological changes, but was disliked by youth. This three-part study includes a participatory design workshop, application redesign, and subsequent field deployment to understand how wearable devices can support self-regulation. Twenty-seven youth designed activities that revealed interest in and models of self-regulation that became part of a smartwatch app. Researchers revisited and redesign the application based on youth feedback, and then released the redesigned application (some of whom participated in workshops, some of whom did not). Redesigning the application to be responsive to youth needs resulted in higher levels of satisfaction than previously observed. Youth also used this application more often and reported higher use. Three design tensions persisted: (1) Breath counting applications as attention grabbing vs. attention cultivating and (2) breath counting activities as a relaxation activity vs. a mental workout, and (3) exposing youth to meditation and breath counting as a strategy for developing healthy minds vs. an institutionalized or compulsory required action. Activity occupied positions along these continua, which creates associated challenges for researchers. A fruitful design space exists for researchers to integrate attention focusing into activities that youth value, which can include stress reduction or mindfulness training, but also could be simply to improve their academic work.

Video Games and Learning

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022 · 24 citations

• Computer Science
• Mathematics education
• Computer Science

This chapter reviews research on how video games have been used in schools and other learning environments and how they impact learning outcomes. This chapter reviews four functions of video games in learning. Games as content teach specific disciplinary knowledge, for example in history, math, second language learning, physics, and medicine. Games as bait leverage the engaging aspects of video games to attract students to the game even when it is not obviously about learning. Games as assessment use the “leveling up” feature of games, where players advance to the next level as their skills increase, as a way to assess the player’s developing knowledge. Games as architectures for engagement are studied by examining how and why people play games and how they can be designed to best foster learning by fostering involvement, immersion, and investment – often using narrative structures. There is evidence that when games are designed on learning sciences principles, they contribute to deeper learning.