In recent years, serious energy games (SEGs) garnered increasing attention as an innovative and effective approach to tackling energy-related challenges. This review delves into the multifaceted landscape of SEG, specifically focusing on their wide-ranging applications in various contexts. The study investigates potential enhancements in user engagement achieved through integrating social connections, personalization, and data integration. Among the main challenges identified, previous studies overlooked the full potential of serious games in addressing emerging needs in energy systems, opting for oversimplified approaches. Further, these studies exhibit limited scalability and constrained generalizability, which poses challenges in applying their findings to larger energy systems and diverse scenarios. By incorporating lessons learned from prior experiences, this review aims to propel the development of SEG toward more innovative and impactful directions. It is firmly believed that positive behavior changes among individuals can be effectively encouraged by using SEG.

Background: The smartphone market is saturated with apps and games purporting to promote mental wellness. There has been a significant number of studies assessing the impact of these digital interventions. Motivation: The majority of review papers solely focussed on the impact of strict rules and award systems of the apps. There is comparatively little attention paid to other game techniques designed to encourage creativity, a lusory attitude, and playful experiences. Results: This gap is addressed in this paper in a consideration and analysis of a purposive selection of six mobile games marketed for wellbeing, our focus is on both external and internal motivations that these games offer. Our specific interest is how these games balance rule-based play with creativity. We find that ludic play is a highly-structured, rule-bound, goal-oriented play, in contrast to paedic play which a freeform, imaginative, and expressive. We argue that while ludic play is purposed towards the promotion of habit formation and generates feelings of accomplishment, it nonetheless relies heavily on extrinsic motivation to incentivise engagement. By contrast, paidic play, specifically role-playing, improvisation, and the imaginative co-creation of fictional game worlds, can be used effectively in these games to facilitate self-regulation, self-distancing, and therefore provides intrinsically-motivated engagement. In the context of games for mental wellbeing, ludic play challenges players to complete therapeutic exercises, while paidic play offers a welcoming refuge from real world pressures and the opportunity to try on alternate selves. Conclusion: Our intention is not to value paidic play over ludic play, but to consider how these two play modalities can complement and counterbalance each other to generate more effective engagement.

As global energy concerns escalate, there is a growing need for effective strategies to promote sustainable energy practices among individuals and communities. Gamification, the integration of game-design elements in non-game contexts, emerges as a promising tool to enhance user engagement and foster sustainable behaviour in energy management. In this review, we examine the theoretical aspects of gamification and its application in energy management in users’ households, highlighting its potential to transform repetitive or even monotonous tasks into engaging activities, focusing on studies that measure a long-term effect. We delve into various gamified elements adopted in long-term studies, such as feedback, social interactions, point systems, leader boards, narrative-driven challenges, etc., to understand their effect on user motivation and behavioural changes. From our set of studies, we found out that strong social game elements contribute the most to the long-term behaviour change of energy usage. One more condition of behaviour change is strong positive user satisfaction: the game should be engaging. We highlight the possible limitations of gamification in an energy management situation, a strong need for better practices of design and evaluation, and innovative approaches (such as DSM; Demand Side Management) in gamification for long-term engagement in household energy management.