Analysis of the Research Status, HotSpots, and Evolutionary Trends of Global Educational Games from a Knowledge Graph Perspective

This study visualized and quantitatively analyzed educational games' research literature data using the CiteSpace visualization tool to better understand global educational games' research status and development trends. First, the basic information on educational games was analyzed regarding annual publication volume, authors, countries/regions, and institutions. Second, the basic content and research hotspots of educational games research were analyzed through keyword co-occurrence mapping and high-frequency keywords. Finally, by analyzing the co-citation clustering mapping and co-cited literature mutation, the research frontier path and development history of educational games were sorted out, and its future development trend was predicted. The results show that the research hotspots of educational games focus on student motivation, educational game design, engagement, and teaching strategies. The research frontier path mainly involves five aspects: design and development of educational games, teaching effectiveness, influencing factors, application methods or teaching strategies, and educational evaluation. This paper systematically analyzes the latest development of global educational game research and objectively predicts that multi-disciplinary applications in multiple fields, the use of emerging technologies to enhance student's learning experience, and the improvement of evaluation mechanisms are likely to be the future development trends of educational games.