Serious games and cyber behavior

Since the introduction of Pong and Space Invaders as arcade games in the 1970s, computer games have had a significant impact on how we spend our leisure time. Prensky (2001) stated that: Computer and videogames are potentially the most engaging pastime in the history of mankind. The strong appeal of games continues with the market for Video gaming predicted to exceed 90 billion US dollars in 2020 (WePC, 2020). The leading scholars in the area of serious game include Clark C. Abt of Abt Associates (Abt, 1970); Mark Prensky (Award winning internationally acclaimed keynote speaker and author) (Prensky, 2001); Kurt Squire at the University of California-Irvine (Squire, 2004); Constance Steinkuehler at the University of California-Irvine (Steinkuehler, 2004); Sara de Freitas at Wey Education PLC (De Freitas & Oliver, 2006); James Paul Gee formerly of Arizona State University (Gee, 2007); Simon Egenfeldt-Nielson at Serious Games Interactive (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2007); Ben Sawyer of Digitalmill Inc. (Sawyer & Smith, 2008); Clark Aldrich of SimuLearn (Aldrich, 2009); Jacob Habgood at Sheffield Hallam University (Habgood & Ainsworth, 2011); Jane McGonigal at SuperBetter Labs (McGonigal, 2015); Alessandro De Gloria and Francesco Bellotti at the University of Genoa (De Gloria, Bellotti & Berta, 2014); Elizabeth Boyle and Thomas Hainey at the University of the West of Scotland (Boyle et al., 2016); Patrick Felicia at the Waterford Institute of Technology (Abdul Jabbar & Felicia, 2015); Matthew Barr at Glasgow University (Barr, 2019); Nicola Whitton at Durham Centre for Academic Development (Whitton & Langan, 2019) and Sylvester Arnab of the Disruptive Media Learning Lab/Centre for Post-digital Cultures at Coventry University (Arnab, 2020).