Point systems in Games for Health: A bibliometric scoping study

TL;DR

This bibliometric study analyzes the use of point systems in health-related games, categorizing them into video, serious, and educational games, and discusses their health impacts and potential for promoting healthy behaviors.

Contribution

It provides a novel taxonomy of point systems in health games and insights into their health effects and research focus areas.

Findings

Video games mostly have negative health effects.

Serious games can have positive health and professional competency effects.

Research spans educational, traditional, and sporting games.

Abstract

Very few details about point systems used in games for health are reported in scientific literature. To shed some light on this topic a bibliometric study, analyzing the papers containing terms related to games for health and point systems was performed and a mini taxonomy was derived. The search string game* AND health AND (point* OR score) AND system* in a Scopus bibliographic database was used to produce the corpus. We limited the search to articles, reviews and conference papers written in English and to topics related to medical, health and social subjects. The corpus papers abstracts and titles were analysed by VOSviewer and a scientific landscape was generated. The search resulted in a corpus consisting of 354 papers. The derived taxonomy contains three objects; video games, serious games and educational games. The biblimetric mapping and taxonomy revealed some interesting conclusions: (1) the video games have mostly negative effects on health, (2) the serious games might have both a direct positive health effects on users and also indirect effects by improved competencies of health professionals, and (3) the research is concerned not only to computer based educational games, but also to traditional table games and sporting games. Based on the derived taxonomy we can conclude that point systems should reward physical activity and healthy living style and punish sedentary activities.