Global trends and geographical gaps in traditional games research: a systematic bibliometric review

Research on traditional games remains highly fragmented, obscuring global trends and persistent geographical disparities. To address this gap, this study maps the literature to clarify the field's intellectual structure. We employed a systematic bibliometric analysis of 57 peer-reviewed English articles from Scopus (2014-2024), utilizing VOSviewer and Biblioshiny to analyze publication trajectories, keyword networks, and thematic structures. Findings reveal growing academic interest overwhelmingly tied to cultural preservation, education, and physical activity. Uniquely, our mapping exposes a stark cultural hegemony: scholarly output is heavily concentrated in North America and Europe, rendering regions with profound indigenous play heritages largely invisible. Although limited by a single-database scope, these findings provide actionable value. They offer a vital roadmap for policymakers and educators to seamlessly embed indigenous play into contemporary public health and learning designs. Academically, exposing these geographical imbalances directly challenges established Western-centric biases. Future cross-disciplinary research must prioritize underrepresented communities and shift toward empirical interventions to drive a truly equitable advancement in global scholarship.