A Systematic Review of Game Designs and Outcomes of Serious Games Targeting Different Groups in Language Learning

Introduction

As technology grows by leaps and bounds, the concept of serious game has gained increasing popularity among people in different walks of life, such as education (Acquah & Katz, 2020; Yu et al., 2021) and healthcare (Kokol et al., 2020). Most importantly, recent years have witnessed the booming of the serious game. It was argued that a game with specific aims achieves cognitive and affective engagement more than motivating attitudinal or behavioral engagement (Ouariachi et al., 2018). As a result, serious game has become a prevalent issue discussed by scholars, and their increasing yearly outcomes are in Figure 1. It was a tendency for publications and citations of the keywords “serious game” searched on the Web of Science (WoS) on October 31, 2022.

Figure 1.

The tendency of publications and citations of “serious game” shown in Web of Science

Serious games were always conceived as novel learning and teaching tools that combined learning with entertainment. In terms of educational contexts, serious games could bring better performance and more gain of knowledge in the learners when compared with the traditional way of instruction (Giannakos, 2013) in that serious educational games were tools that possessed the ability to better-learning equality, exert positive impacts on behavior, cognition, and emotion of the learners (Daoudi, 2022). In terms of healthcare, a serious game could be applied to deal with people with autism spectrum disorders, which was available to enhance the ability to recognize and show fundamental emotions of people with autism spectrum disorders (Dantas & do Nascimento, 2022). It is thus of great significance to administrate a timely systematic review of serious game to improve the individual ability to language learning.

There are a considerable number of innovative studies on serious games concerning education and healthcare. For instance, a scoping review examined empirical evidence and the influences of digital game-based language learning (Hung et al., 2018). A study on the game-based invention for disorderly developed kids could be searched (Kokol et al., 2020). Some papers focused on the learning outcomes for different study sections (Acquah & Katz, 2020). A scoping review narrowed down its research field on language learning (Xu et al., 2020). However, the two disparate branches were never compared and discussed in the same systematic review together. Therefore, the importance of conducting a systematic review is again demonstrated. To complement this missing link, this study aimed to compare the difference between serious games of the two domains, namely, typically developing individuals and those with autism, in terms of game design and outcome, which differed from the studies mentioned above. The comparison between these studies and the current one is summarized in Table 1.