Mapping role-playing games in Ibero-America: An educational review

Abstract

Role-playing games (RPGs) have a controversial public image in several countries, including Spain. These fears lack a scientific basis, as role-playing games may be useful in education. Educational trends such as gamification are helping to change this perspective, incorporating elements of RPGs in applications like learning management systems (LMS), e.g., Classcraft. Given the increased research interest in this topic, this paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) report on the state-of-the-art related to RPGs in an Ibero-American education research context. In the study, a comprehensive search is carried out for the most relevant research papers indexed in Latindex, founded through the virtual repository Dialnet for papers between 2010 and 2019 in the field of education. The search chain was 'role-playing games', erasing those topics not related. Results show that there are several relevant references, even though they do not seem to have had a great impact. It can be concluded that there is an interest in RPGs in education, especially in Spain, but their potential is still to be developed.