6 291 EXPLICIT MESSAGING PROMOTES GAME SELECTION game and because there was no contamination of any in-game mental health content, as would be the case with most existing therapeutic games. Finally, the current study included at-risk participants with elevated mental health symptoms, arguably the most relevant target audience for therapeutic games. Thus, our sample is likely representative of the audience who would be seeking such games and serious game designers with mental health targets would benefit from incorporating our messaging results. Naturally, the study also has a number of limitations. The sample overrepresented highly educated young adults, females, and social science students due to our recruitment strategy. Highly educated social science students may be more open to and curious about innovative mental health interventions, which may have inflated the interest for the mental health game. Similarly, women may potentially be more attracted to mental health games than men, as a recent review indicates that gender influences gaming motives and behaviour (Veltri et al., 2014), which could have skewed our results. Thus, it is advisable for future research to include men and women equally, to target a more diverse group of young adults, as well as to target other age groups as children may react differently to messaging. Another limitation to consider is the experimental setting in which participants selected and played the game. First, the length of the experiment limited gameplay to a single session under 45 min. Vital differences in gameplay patterns between mental health and entertainment games may only become visible when repeated gameplay is possible and sessions are not artificially limited. Therefore, future research is needed that observes naturalistic gameplay over a matter of weeks or even months. Second, participants may still have selected a different game than they would have outside the lab due to several experimental factors. The choice within the experiment was limited to two games, rather than the reality of almost unlimited video game choice, in which one mental health game may not even attract enough attention to be considered as an option. Moreover, participants may have behaved in a socially desirable way when choosing a game, knowing that their choice was recorded. On the one hand, participants may have assumed that selecting the mental health game (i.e., an uncommon game type) was preferred by the experiment leader. On the other hand, participants may have felt that selecting the mental health game indicated needing a therapeutic intervention and therefore selected the more normative entertainment game. A final way the experimental setting may limit the generalisability of this study is the fact that the experimental environment may have encouraged participants to make a more thoughtful choice, potentially
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