Serious games for people with mental disorders: State of the art of practices to maintain engagement and accessibility

Serious games are used in different sectors such as education, health, work, etc. Among the potential users of serious games are persons suffering from mental illness. Mental disorders affect a person's memory, thinking, perceptions or behaviour. This type of disability makes it more difficult to create games for people suffering from it. Indeed, the constraints associated with this type of disability will add barriers to games and make the task more difficult and potentially more frustrating for the gambler. In this review paper, we propose a study of serious games from 2014 to 2020 designed for people with mental illness, in particular schizophrenia, dementia, ASD, Alzheimer's, MCI, ADHD and PTSD. First, we propose a review of the literature on the objectives and diseases targeted by the games in the scientific literature. Secondly, we study the different approaches used to make these games accessible to the targeted players. It can be noted that the general strategy consists in reducing the number of stimuli present simultaneously to avoid disorienting the player. Reducing the number of stimuli can be intrinsic to the game (by proposing a very simple game), configurable (via a menu of options) or dynamic (system that adjusts itself automatically).