34 Chapter 2 A consistent and large body of evidence in the therapy literature shows that nonspecific factors play an important role in treatment efficacy and improve mental health outcomes, and even more so than specific therapeutic techniques that are based on theories about mental health disorder onset and maintenance (Ahn & Wampold, 2001; Lambert, 2005, 2011; Messer & Wampold, 2002; Wampold, 2001). Examples of the most important and most researched nonspecific factors include the client-therapist relationship (Krupnick et al., 2006; Norcross, 2002), expectations for improvement (Asay & Lambert, 1999; Crum & Phillips, 2015; Kazdin, 1979), hope (Ilardi & Craighead, 1994), mindset or implicit theories of beliefs about the malleability of personal attributes (Crum & Phillips, 2015; Dweck, 2017b; Tamir et al., 2007), and motivation or readiness to change (Dozois et al., 2004; Lewis et al., 2009; Norcross et al., 2011; Prochaska & Norcross, 2001; Taylor et al., 2012). Although nonspecific factors play a significant role in treatment outcomes, research on games for mental health has largely overlooked these factors (Enck et al., 2017; Torous & Firth, 2016). Considering the central role of nonspecific factors in nearly all psychological interventions (Lambert, 2005), it is likely that these factors, at least in part, contribute to the improvements in mental health observed in applied games as well. Interestingly, two recent randomised controlled trials each investigating the effectiveness of an applied game relative to a casual game, showed equal improvements in anxiety symptoms for both the intervention and control group (Scholten et al., 2016; Schoneveld et al., 2016). This suggests that both specific and nonspecific factors played a role in the applied games. Therefore, it is crucial to examine whether positive intervention outcomes are caused by the specific therapeutic techniques incorporated in the game or by nonspecific factors. Contributions and Aims of the Current Review Systematically reviewing the effectiveness of both applied and casual games for mental health as well as current research trends would contribute to moving this rapidly growing field forward. Although several reviews and meta-analyses have already been conducted on this topic, these previous studies focused on either applied or casual games exclusively (e.g., Cheng et al., 2019; Dewhirst et al., 2022; Eichenberg & Schott, 2017; Lau et al., 2017; Shah et al., 2018), on specific mental health domains (e.g., Barnes & Prescott, 2018; Fang et al., 2019; Fleming et al., 2017; Macedo et al., 2015; Pallavicini et al., 2021; Penuelas-Calvo et al., 2020; Silva et al., 2021; Strahler Rivero et al., 2015; Suenderhauf et al., 2016; Thabrew et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2021), on clinical populations only (e.g., Dewhirst et al., 2022; Eichenberg & Schott, 2017; Horne-Moyer et al.,
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