The relationship between online game playing motivation and selection of online game characters – the case of Taiwan

Shao-Kang Lo, Ting Lie and Chiuan-Luen Li

Behaviour and Information Technology, 2016, vol. 35, issue 1, 57-67

Abstract: The alarming growth rate in the online game industry calls for a need of understanding the determinants of online gamers’ behaviour. Investigating how online gamers choose different online characters assists online game vendors to design characters that match the needs of different online gamers. Recently, numerous online game designers have introduced celebrity figures as characters for certain online games. The popularity of those celebrities has resulted in greater awareness of these games, and hopefully further increases the playability of online games. While different online gamers are motivated by different desires for playing, it is insufficiently researched whether these online celebrity characters have actually altered players’ choice in giving preference to these games. Thus, this study conducts an experimental design to study the reasons behind players’ choice of characters by studying how online games perceive the interpersonal attractiveness of celebrity online characters, and how online gamers with different playing motivations display different behaviours in their choice of online game characters. Results from the survey filled out by participants after the experiments show that the attractiveness of celebrity online characters is significantly higher than that of non-celebrity characters. Further, online game players with a social playing motivation tend to choose celebrities as their online game characters.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0144929X.2015.1094826 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tbitxx:v:35:y:2016:i:1:p:57-67

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tbit20

DOI: 10.1080/0144929X.2015.1094826

Access Statistics for this article

Behaviour and Information Technology is currently edited by Dr Panos P Markopoulos

More articles in Behaviour and Information Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().