Quo Vadis Business Simulation Games in the 21st Century?

Abstract

Business simulation games have become popular in higher education and business environments. The paper aims to identify the primary research trends and topics of business simulation games research using a systematic and automated literature review with the motivation of research (learning driven and domain driven). Based on these findings, the future development of business simulation games research projected papers that research business simulation games were extracted from Scopus. Second, the research timeline, main publication venues and citation trends have been analysed. Third, the most frequent words, phrases, and topics were extracted using text mining. Results indicate that the research on business simulation games has stagnated, with the most cited papers published in the 2000s. There is a balance between learning-driven and domain driven-research, while technology-driven research is scarce, indicating that the technology used for business simulation games is mature. We project that the research on business simulation games needs to be directed in the area of new technologies that could improve communication with and among the users (virtual reality, augmented reality, simulation games) and technologies that could improve the reasoning and decision-making complexity in business simulation games (artificial intelligence).