As games technologies have become more and more widely available, the ability of games to engage users effectively in specific, designed activities has been seized as an opportunity to use computer games for purposes beyond recreation. Since the term ‘serious games’ was comprehensively defined in 2002, they have been used as tools to gives individuals a novel way to interact with games in order to promote physical activities, to learn skills and knowledge, to support social or emotional development, to treat different types of psychological and physical disorders, to generate awareness, and to advertize and promote in application areas such as engineering, education and training, competence development, healthcare, military, advertizing, city planning, production, and crisis response to name just a few. Many recent studies have identified the benefits of using video games for a variety of serious purposes. Serious gaming is a particularly timely subject as there has been recent re-emergence of serious games design and production; one 2010 market study indicated that the worldwide market for serious games was worth 1.5 billion euro.

The aim of the annual International Conference on Serious Games Development and Applications (SGDA) is to disseminate and exchange knowledge on serious games technologies, game design and development; to provide practitioners and interdisciplinary communities with a peer-reviewed forum to discuss the state of the art in serious games research, their ideas and theories, and innovative applications of serious games; to explain cultural, social and scientific phenomena by means of serious games; to concentrate on the interaction between theory and application; to share best practice and lessons learnt; to develop new methodologies in various application domains using games technologies; to explore perspectives of future developments and innovative applications relevant to serious games and related areas; and to establish and foster a cross-sector and cross-disciplinary network of researchers, game developers, practitioners, domain experts, and students interested in serious games.

The 5th International Conference on Serious Games Development and Applications (SGDA 2014) was hosted by University of Applied Sciences HTW Berlin in Germany and was ‘co-located’ with the European Conference on Games Based Learning (ECGBL 2014). SGDA 2014 appeared in the sequence of the successes of the First SGDA held at Derby in 2010, the Second SGDA conference at Lisbon in 2011, the Third SGDA at Bremen in 2012, and the Fourth SGDA at Trondheim in 2013.
The Conference was supported by the European GALA Network of Excellence for Serious Games, FP7 TARGET Project, SINTEF, Glasgow School of Art, University of Applied Sciences HTW Berlin, University of Bremen, BIBABremen Institute for Production & Logistics, Technical University of Lisbon, INESC-ID/IST, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, University of Derby, and a number of prestigious European partners. This year, HTW Berlin hosted the fifth annual conference (SGDA 2014) during 9–10 October 2014. 18 full papers and 1 invited keynote covering a wide range of aspects of serious games design and use were presented at SGDA 2014. Speakers came from 14 countries throughout Europe and around the world, including Canada, Australia, Malaysia and China. The papers are published in the Springer LNCS 8778. The keynote speaker was Dr. Stefan G¨obel, Head of Serious Gaming in the Multimedia Communications Lab (KOM), Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

We would like thank all the authors, speakers, and reviewers for their contributions to SGDA 2014 and welcome you to participate in our discussions at the conference.