The impact of educational live action role-playing games on social-emotional competence: a mixed-method study with Chinese college students.

Background: Social-emotional competence is critical for university students' personal development and social adaptation, and exploring effective educational interventions in this regard is an important research area. Live action role-playing games (LARPs) have shown potential in promoting social skills and emotional regulation, but their specific impacts on Chinese university students remain largely unexplored. Objective: This mixed-method research was designed to explore the influence of real-time educational role-playing games (LARPs) on the social-emotional competence of Chinese university students. Methods: A sample of 84 participants was recruited, with 42 assigned to the control group and 42 to the experimental group. Over an 8-week period, the experimental group engaged in the educational live action role-playing games project for 2-5 h per week. To comprehensively evaluate the social-emotional competence of the participants, the Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire was employed for quantitative assessment. Additionally, in-depth one-on-one interviews were employed within a qualitative research design to conduct thematic analysis. Based on quantitative and qualitative research, an explanatory sequential design was adopted to comprehensively identify the research findings. Results and Discussion: The results demonstrated that, compared with the control group, the experimental group exhibited a significant increase in social-emotional competence. In the dimensions of Engaging with others, Collaboration, and Open-mindedness, the improvements were remarkable. Further in-depth analysis indicated significant progress in specific sub-dimensions within each competency. In Engaging with others, Assertiveness and Sociability were enhanced; in Collaboration, Empathy and Co-operation were improved; and in Open-mindedness, Tolerance and Curiosity showed growth. Both the qualitative and quantitative data consistently suggest that educational live action role-playing games can arouse the interest of a wide range of students and effectively enhance their social-emotional competence. Drawing from the results, this research offered pedagogical and analytical insights to enhance the integration of educational live action role-playing games into co-curricular programs at the higher education context: providing high-quality scenario scripts with pedagogical significance, creating immersive contextually authentic environments, and implementing professional development programs for facilitators. This research also provided a new perspective on integrating game-centered elements and cooperative mechanisms into official curricula.