Drawing the big picture of games in education: A topic modeling-based review of past 55 years

The literature of games in education has a rich and multidisciplinary content. Due to the large number of studies in the field, it is not easy to analyze all relevant studies. There are few studies exploring the big picture of research trends in the field. For this reason, the purpose of this study is to examine longitudinal trends of game-based research in education using text mining techniques. 4980 publications were retrieved as an experimental dataset indexed by the SCOPUS database in the period 1968 to mid-2021. The results include descriptive statistics of game-based research, trends of the research topics, and trends in the frequency of each topic over time. They show that the number of studies focusing on the use of games in education has increased, particularly since the 2000s when Internet use accelerated and became widespread. Approximately 70% of all the studies were conducted in the last 10 years. One third of the studies is related to the main topic of game-based learning. It is significant that in the last three decades the topic of serious games has been among the top three trends. Considering usage acceleration of the topics, the highest values belong to game-based learning, serious games and student science games, in that order. The findings of this study are expected to guide the field by providing a better understanding of the trends of games in education and offer a direction for future research. •Increase in the number of game researches in the last two decades was explored.•Transition to Serious Educational Games and Game-based Learning Terms was seen.•Increase in the number of games developed in science and physical education was explored.•Insufficient number of robust and longitudinal researches was obtained.•The key purpose of the study is to reveal the trends and changes in game in education.