What Does Make Players Want to Play More? A Moderating Role of Construal Level of Game

Young June Sah, Rabindra Ratan, James Chirackal, Lisa Doan, Ciara Johnson, Grant Kunzelman and Shaurya Srivastava

Abstract

Video game players enjoy themselves from various features of a video game, ranging from low-level sensory and motor stimulations (e.g., controlling the character in realistic visual and aural presentation) to high-level goals and meanings given by a game context (e.g., taking a role and completing missions). Accordingly, people may construe the in-game experience at different levels. To some players, for example, playing a sport video game can be experienced at a low level as operating an input device to mimic a required bodily motion in a sport, whereas to others it can be construed at a high level as competing with other athletes and trying to win the competition. The level of experience, or construal level, has drawn attention from researchers in social psychology because of its potentials to generate psychological and behavioral consequences (e.g., Burgoon, Henderson, & Markman, 2013; Ledgerwood, Trope, & Liberman, 2010; Liberman & Förster, 2009). Particularly, a high-level construal of an object or event has shown to result in consistency between attitude and behavior toward the object (Ledgerwood et al., 2010; Ledgerwood & Trope, 2010). Drawing on this notion, we developed a hypothesis on the moderating role of construal level on the relationship between evaluation of game experience and behavior to decide to play the game more or not. That is, we expect that people who have high-level experience of video game will behave in a consistent way with their evaluation of the game experience, in such ways that they choose to play a video game more when they enjoyed playing the game but they choose not to play when didn't enjoy playing it.