“Let’s play house!” one child screams. “Who do you want to be?” another answers. Play for children has always had a serious component, as it prepares them to enter adult life by mimicking in play, games, and sports the activities and behaviors that will serve them later. For decades, businesses, educators, and therapists have used games to engage, teach, and communicate.

This book is a sophisticated study of how games, based on a trilogy of multi-disciplinary technologies, are used to benefit the “well-being” of an extremely diverse population, including at-risk elderly, the disabled, autistic and other problematic children, surgeons learning procedures, and urban designers and architects. To attend to the needs of such a diverse clientele, the studies chosen by the editors rely on the region where artificial reality, serious games, and play therapy overlap. The selected studies included here depend on digital technology for their support.

The book is divided into five parts. The editors clearly admit that their coverage from part to part is inconsistent: some sections include many more studies than others. Despite uneven coverage, the editors had a specific goal in mind: presenting studies that fulfilled their criteria of inclusive well-being in as many areas as possible would serve as a catalyst for debate on the use of interactive computer technology as a scaffolding for serving the future needs of a diverse and growing population.

Part 1, “Technologies for Rehabilitation,” contains the largest number of studies, devoted mainly to disabled and other at-risk adults. Included are serious games for memory enhancement, cognitive rehabilitation, and spatial orientation, all digitally based on a one-on-one interaction with a computer. One study, developed to engage autistic children, describes the use of computer-based social robotics.

Part 2, “Technologies for Music Therapy and Expression,” includes two major studies that describe the task of designing musical instruments for a disabled population who may have had no former musical training and who cannot, physically, play standard musical instruments. One describes the process, partially digital, used to create instruments for new means of musical expression. A second describes the ways in which individuals learn to play these instruments and make music with them in little orchestral groups, as opposed to working alone with the computer as a companion.

Part 3, “Technologies for Well-Being,” includes the following studies: “Serious Games as Positive Technologies for Individual and Group Flourishing,” “Using Technology to Foster Positive Emotional States,” “Sharing Goals and Emotional Experiences: Sport as a Narrative Tool,” “Spontaneous Interventions for Health: How Digital Games May Supplement Urban Design Projects,” “Active Design Guidelines and Community Games,” “Improve Access to Co-Design Projects with Playful Approaches,” and “Using Virtual Environments to Test the Effects of Lifelike Architecture on People.”

Part 4, “Technologies for Education and Education for Rehabilitative Technologies,” includes “An Overview of Virtual Simulation and Serious Gaming for Surgical Education and Training” and “The Ongoing Development of a Multimedia Educational Gaming Module,” where students developed educational games for problematic young learners.

Part 5, “Disruptive Innovation,” is about disruptive innovation theory, which describes how a new innovation can change the existing status quo by introducing a better methodology, idea, or product that is not originally accepted due to its high cost and unfamiliar new concepts, procedures, and/or materials, but is gradually accepted and eventually transforms the marketplace. This chapter discusses cloud computing as a disruptive innovation, which at the start was very expensive and limited to few users, but eventually transformed the marketplace as many organizations adopted it. The section “SoundScapes: Serious Games, Alternative Realities and Play” discusses ways in which nonbeliever behaviors can be modified in order to accept a new innovation. “A Cloud-Based Archive Architecture” describes how cloud-based computing, rejected early on as a disruptive innovation, was eventually accepted by health-based organizations for its cost-cutting and opportune access to data.

While most of the examples in this book are health based, the concepts described can benefit anyone interested in how serious games may be used for learning and change, regardless of application.