2 59 REVIEW OF APPLIED & CASUAL GAMES FOR MENTAL HEALTH condition (Axford et al., 2020; David & Fodor, 2023), and one study compared an active condition to a casual game (Hammond et al., 2014). Two studies compared an applied game to both an active and passive condition, and contributed two effect sizes to the plot (David et al., 2019b; Valenzuela et al., 2022). As seen in Figure A.16 (Appendix), the three effect sizes comparing the applied game to an active condition ranged from –0.10 to 0.33, with only the study of Valenzuela et al. (2022) showing a significant effect favouring the active condition. When adjusting for clustering, however, this effect became nonsignificant. The four effect sizes comparing the applied game to a passive condition ranged from –0.06 to 0.36: Axford et al. (2020) and David and Fodor (2023) found a significant effect in favour of the applied game. When adjusting for clustering, however, the effect size in Axford et al. (2020) became nonsignificant. Finally, the study of Hammond et al. (2014) showed a nonsignificant effect size of 0.13 when comparing the casual games to an active condition. Methodological Characteristics Risk of Bias Figures A.2 and A.3 (Appendix) present both the domain-level and overall risk-of-bias judgements for the included papers. Data from the underlined papers were used to calculate effect sizes and included in the forest plots. Out of the 145 papers included in this review, most demonstrated either low or moderate overall risk of bias (75 and 57 papers, respectively), while 13 were deemed to have a high overall risk of bias. Around a sixth of the included papers showed moderate to high risk of bias due to missing outcome data, bias in measurement of the outcome and/or bias in selection of the reported result. Multi-modal Interventions Across both populations, several studies examined the effect of multi-modal interventions, combining in one intervention arm: an applied game and treatment as usual/standard program (Bikic et al., 2018; Bul et al., 2018; Bul et al., 2016; Dickinson & Place, 2014; Fisher et al., 2015; Gold & Mahrer, 2018; R. L. Hsieh et al., 2016; Loewy et al., 2016; Mannweiler et al., 2023; Osmanlliu et al., 2021; Schuurmans, Nijhof, Popma, et al., 2021; Schuurmans, Nijhof, Scholte, et al., 2021; Schuurmans et al., 2018; Wijnhoven et al., 2020), an applied game and other intervention program/therapy components (Axford et al., 2020; Beaumont et al., 2015; Beaumont & Sofronoff, 2008; Beaumont et al., 2021;
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw