The Third International Conference on Serious Games Development and Applications is this year organised as a satellite conference to IFIP-ICEC2012 in Bremen. SGDA 2012 appears in the sequence of the successes of the First International Workshop on Serious Games Development and Application held in Derby in 2010 and Second International Conference on Serious Games Development and Applications, held in Lisbon in 2011. The aim of SGDA is to collect and disseminate knowledge on serious games technologies, 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; and to explore perspectives of future developments and innovative applications relevant to serious games and related areas.