With the increasing ubiquity of digital technologies, a growing number of children, youths, and adults are using digital devices to communicate with each other and engage in gaming practices. For instance, from 2016 to 2020 in Singapore, individual smart phone usage increased from 48% to 78% for children under 15, 92%–100% for 15–24-year-olds, 76%–98% for 25–74-year-olds, and 11%–60% for those 75 and above (Infocomm Media Development Authority, 2021). Digital play is critical for enabling children and young adults to develop the skills and social-emotional wellbeing (Shoshani et al., 2021) needed in their daily lives. In schools, digital technologies have been integrated into evolving educational policies and programmes assessing social-emotional learning. These programmes highlight the endeavour of educational researchers to find suitable digital tools to measure students’ performance (Abrahams et al., 2019).
Studies investigating students' digital literacies have shown that few of their perceived skills relate to their actual performance and that, generally, students significantly overestimate their actual competencies, especially their social-emotional skills (e.g., Porat et al., 2018). Social-emotional skills have a strong correlation with emotional intelligence and are a fundamental component of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to monitor one's own and others' emotions, to distinguish between these emotions, and to use the emotional information to guide one's thinking and actions. This ability can be learned and taught (Salovey & Mayer, 1990) using video games (Carissoli & Villani, 2019). Salovey and Mayer (1990) described emotional intelligence as a set of conceptually related mental processes involving emotional information. The mental processes include appraising and expressing emotions in the self and others, regulating emotion in the self and others, and using emotions in adaptative ways (Salovey & Mayer, 1990). Video games can promote emotional intelligence because they allow one to experience positive emotions, undo persistent negative emotions, and improve resilience (Granic et al., 2014). Video games may also allow one to become intrinsically motivated to gain competence, autonomy, and satisfy the need of relatedness, which are all correlated with emotional regulation and mental wellbeing (Przybylski et al., 2010). Additionally, video games can train players to regulate negative emotions when they experience anger, fear, anxiety, sadness, and frustration in the game world, and to learn how to recognise and manage these difficult emotions in the safe environment of video games (Granic et al., 2014) through reflection and think-aloud (Toh & Kirschner, 2020).
