Effects of Serious Games on Student Engagement, Motivation, Learning Strategies, Cognition, and Enjoyment

Serious games have been deemed as an effective tool to engage students with various needs and expectations. Although serious games have emerged as an important assistant in education, sparse studies have systematically reviewed the related studies in the fields of bibliographic knowledge structure and their effects. Through CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and content analysis, this study concludes that: (1) Many studies have demonstrated that serious games could improve student engagement, motivation, learning strategies, and cognition; (2) The prominent advantages of serious games may be the enjoyment, followed by enhanced happiness, satisfaction, and positive attitude; (3) The study also discussed recently developed serious games and their effectiveness in education. It is suggested that future research could focus on the assessment of serious games to select the effective serious games and improve their design.