The research is ascribed to Personal and Social Learning & Ethics (PSLE) that advocates for the implementation of serious games (SG) in educational contexts to promote personal and social learning from an ethical perspective. The paper analyzes the educational potential of a sample of free online anti-bullying SG (N = 10)-promoted by international educational institutions-aimed at developing prosocial skills in schoolchildren. The study adopts a qualitative methodology, focused on the content analysis, to identify the strategies they adopt on: 1) psycho-ludic and interactive aspects (typology of exposed aggressions, underlying learning theory and adopted play strategies); and, 2) the

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Research about the effectiveness of persuasive games is still emerging. This article presents a literature review of studies that empirically evaluate the effectiveness of persuasive games. The review concluded that limited empirical evidence is currently available to prove their effectiveness in attitude change. It further revealed that almost no study employed an informative control condition, making it difficult to conclude that the game was more effective than a control condition. Next, in a pretest-posttest design an empirical study tested whether change in attitude was different for people playing the persuasive game "EnerCities" compared to a control condition where participants read a document with highly similar information. No significant differences in increase of attitude or knowledge between participants that played the game and participants in the informative control condition were found. Based on the results of the literature review and the empirical study presented, it hence cannot be concluded that playing a game leads to a greater change in attitude or knowledge acquisition than experiencing conventional media would. Future work should employ designs with proper control conditions and focus on which game features lead to significant effects.

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