Until recently, research on video games has been concerned largely with negative effects of play. Increasingly, however, a range of positive psychological effects of playing video games are being reported. Being able to identify positive impacts is an important step toward leveraging the huge appeal of game playing to aid psychological well-being. This chapter discusses a range of benefits associated with playing two genres of popular off-the-shelf video games as opposed to video games that have been constructed to specifically target education or teach health-related lessons. With the video game phenomenon set to have an ever-increasing impact across society on a global scale, knowledge of games that have the potential to meet positive psychological needs will be critical to leveraging positive outcomes from video game play.

There is a kind of seemingly nonsensical play behavior found in the simulation sandbox game genre. This behavior is very spontaneous and impulsive and associated with self-initiated learning, and here the author seeks to better understand what it is, and why it seems associated with simulation sandbox games. That is: What purpose does it serve, and what might provoke it? This requires a review of the literature on this play behavior, and that of the simulation sandbox genre, respectively. From this review the author concluded firstly that there is strong support that exploratory play is for discovering the structure and behavior of systems, and secondly that the observable characteristics of exploratory play make it a highly probable candidate for the bizarre behavior observed in simulation sandbox games. Moreover, several hypotheses were generated by identifying many characteristics of the genre (e.g. system complexity and responsiveness) that are directly relevant to the theorized motivations for exploratory play, suggesting some directions for future research into what conditions and designs might encourage exploratory play. Knowledge of the relationship between this genre and this form of play could prove invaluable for designing games for learning, because despite being centrally relevant to many studies on game-based learning, exploratory play has been neglected. It has been needlessly isolated in distinct strands of research on its components, which will be unified here to provide a comprehensive account of this behavior and its importance to future research in this area.

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How can one measure the learning outcome of playing a serious game? We need an objective measure of the learning contents included in a game. The research is diverse, utilizing vastly different games to teach various different kinds of knowledge and skills. This makes it difficult to compare and generalize studies, lacking any established formal tool of analysis. This problem requires the design of an abstract and objective measurement of the quantity of learning material independent of the learning domain. Based on cognitive research on causal Bayes nets (CBNs), this paper proposes using dynamic causal nets (DCNs) to model an abstract knowledge base, which could be mapped to many different domains of learning. We also apply Kolmogorov Complexity (KC) as an approach to measure the content of the abstract knowledge base. This work will establish a theoretical foundation for future research of serious games.

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