Abstract:

In the last decade, game-based learning has been increasingly used in higher education (HE), in a variety of fields, ranging from languages to engineering or medical sciences. Scholars from different areas have been researching to understand which are the underlying factors of success and which are the facilitators and barriers of application of this way of learning in HE. There are, as well, some literature reviews on the topic, e.g. Subhash and Cudney (2018), where issues like cultural differences and impact of different technologies or game elements have been pointed out. However, there are still a lot of knowledge gaps to be filled in and, to our knowledge, there are no studies, that duly review and integrate the contributions regarding game-based learning in HE, encompassing:
a) digital and offline technologies and methods;
b) different fields of HE or level of education (i.e. bachelor, master, doctoral education);
c) different student profiles and
d) different teacher profiles.

In that regard, our research seeks to fill in this gap, as we perform a systematic literature review on articles and reviews published in Web of Science, more specifically on ISI Current Contents, in the Social & Behavioural Sciences Database, from 1998 to date. We combined different search equations around games, learning, serious games and higher education, with an initial sample of 998 results exported to Endnote X9, which were manually analyzed by three independent researchers which read the abstracts to ensure that the final set of results was related to the topic under study. The final sample undertook two levels of analysis. A first one included a bibliometric analysis showing the key journals related to game-based learning and top authors in the field. A second one included a qualitative analysis performed with NVivo 12 on the results imported from Endnote, which reveals the research questions, the methodologies and the future research directions, that may be useful to guide scholars that desire to develop the body of knowledge in the future. It also presents the key findings of studies published in the analysed timeframe on the usage of game-based learning in HE, which may be useful to teachers acting in HE who desire to use this approach in their classes.

Keywords:

Game-based Learning.