Play, Learn, Grow: A Decade of Insights into Gamified Socio-Emotional Learning

Gamified socio-emotional learning (SEL) is a new paradigm in education that incorporates game-based techniques to promote prosocial behavior, emotional intelligence, and student engagement. This study's goal is to examine the state, patterns, and thematic evolution of gamified SEL research from an interdisciplinary standpoint. This was accomplished through the use of performance analysis, co-citation analysis, and co-occurrence analysis in a bibliometric analysis. Based on predetermined search parameters, 122 peer-reviewed papers from the Scopus database were retrieved. VOSviewer was used for network mapping and visualization. The papers were published between 2015 and 2024. According to the findings, psychology, education, and human-computer interaction are the main fields contributing to research on gamified SEL. Digital treatments for neurodivergent learners, prosocial behavior, and emotional regulation are given special attention. Digital involvement through serious games, emotional-cognitive aspects of learning, and developmental psychology were the three main study clusters found by co-citation and co-occurrence analysis. According to this study, gamified SEL has a great deal of promise to help achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 3 and 4 by fostering inclusive, stimulating, and cognitively uplifting learning settings. To assure fair and moral implementation in a variety of educational contexts, investigate long-term effects, and fortify theoretical frameworks, more research is required.