Natural hazards pose a threat to human life and health. As a tool of risk communication and disaster education Serious Games (SG) are applied much more frequently. Even though an increase in research on SG is observable, there is not much known on SG's actual impacts on the players. This systematic review gives an overview of existing publications on SG dealing with natural hazards and evaluations of their reported effects on users.
The review consists of 132 papers published between 2007 and 2025. The analysis shows that most publications describe digital SG; analogue (e.g., tabletop or board/card games) or hybrid games (a mix of different modalities) were discussed less frequently. Often, one SG dealing with just one natural hazard is discussed, but also games dealing with multiple natural hazards were observed. Flooding is the hazard addressed most frequently. 23 publications only introduce and describe the serious game(s), while about half of the publications (N=67) report a usability evaluation of the game. This presentation focuses on the 42 publications that also include an evaluation on the SG's impact on the player(s).
Most of these impact evaluation studies do not apply any theoretical frameworks for the game development and/or evaluation processes. Among the few mentions theories by Albert Bandura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi appear most frequently. We critically discuss the applied evaluation methods in the background of the explored impacts. We see a peak in findings on mostly positive effects on knowledge and awareness. Behaviour, motivation, and intention, as well as competencies and further psychological impacts are explored only in few publications. We discuss implications on future research in the field and throw a critical view on the use of SG in disaster communication and education.