Search results

Online games are widely adopted electronic applications that facilitate flow experiences, which is a highly enjoyable experience for players, thus motivating further engagement in online gameplay. During gameplay, players set gaming goals, and they must make cognitive efforts to achieve these goals. However, we do not know how goal-setting and cognitive gaming elements (game complexity and game familiarity) create flow, indicating a research gap. To fill this gap, we use the cognitive gaming elements in the literature and the theoretical elements of goal-setting theory to build a model.

Conducting a large-scale online survey, we collect 3,491 responses from online game players and use structural equation modeling for data analysis.

We find that challenging goals, game complexity, game familiarity and telepresence are positively linked to player-perceived flow, explaining 45% of the variance. The new finding is that challenging goals can strengthen the link between game complexity and flow. We also find that telepresence can strengthen the link between game familiarity and flow.

Our study provides the novel insight that gaming goals and cognitive gaming elements can generate player-perceived flow. This insight can help game makers design gaming elements to accommodate players' cognitive efforts to achieve in-game goals, thus creating flow and effectively increasing players' game engagement.

Online games are popular applications of Internet technology, with over 2.8 billion users worldwide. Many players engage in team gameplay, indicating that online games are suitable media through which players connect with their friends. However, past studies have not examined the ability of games to assist players in connecting with their friends, indicating a gap. To fill this gap, the authors propose a new concept, the friend-connecting affordance, which is the ability of an online game to enable players to contact friends within the game.

The authors built a model to explain how games' friend-connecting affordances influence game loyalty. The authors gathered responses from 1,347 online players and used structural equation modeling to test the model.

The authors found that friend-connecting affordances and team participation influence game loyalty. Gaming intensity and gaming history can moderate the impact of friend-connecting affordances.

This new affordance can be realized through various game elements, offering unique and actionable insights to game makers. The authors also compared the friend-connecting affordances among a number of popular online games, providing insights specific to each game and increasing the practical value of the findings.

Online games are highly popular Internet applications. Some games enable players to save game progress and accumulate experiences or changes to avatars during gameplay, whereas some other games do not, requiring players to restart from the beginning each time. That is, games differ in avatar accumulability. However, we do not know whether games should be designed to permit avatar accumulability or not and how it affects players’ gameplay experience and therefore game outcomes, indicating gaps. Research addressing these gaps can inform game makers in designing games that effectively strengthen their players’ game loyalty.

We used social identity theory (SIT) to construct a theoretical model. To test this model, three waves of survey data were gathered from the same 778 participants.

These findings uniquely indicate that avatar accumulability fosters avatar identification and increases players’ focused immersion, thus increasing players’ loyalty.

Game providers could include game features that enable players to accumulate their avatars’ in-game skins, levels, items (weapons and equipment) and experience points. This accumulability can help strengthen players’ game loyalty.

Overall, our study extends SIT by adding a new trigger (avatar accumulability) and two novel consequences of avatar identification (image protection and focused immersion) in avatar-related systems (games or gamified systems). The new trigger offers an actionable means to apply SIT, while the novel consequences verify the value of applying SIT to study online games.

Organizational commitment could influence nurses’ turnover intention, but we know little about how effort recognition may enhance all three aspects of nurses’ organizational commitment and consequently reduce their turnover intention. This study adopts the self-affirmation theory to examine how the number of effort recognitions received by a nurse may impact the normative, continuance and affective aspects of their organizational commitment and their turnover intention.

We collected two-wave data from the survey responses of 481 nurses in a large medical center in Taiwan between June and August, 2017 and between January and February, 2018 as well as counting the number of times their efforts were recognized as excellent by using patient/family performance appraisal forms in 2016. Bivariate correlation was used to test the hypotheses.

We found that effort recognition is positively associated with nurses’ normative organizational commitment but not with their continuance or affective commitment. The three aspects of organizational commitment are negatively associated with turnover intention.

Nurse managers who hope to reduce nurses’ turnover intention could consider adequately recognizing nurses’ outstanding performance.

The present study is the first to employ the self-affirmation theory to examine the impact of effort recognition on the three aspects of organizational commitment and turnover intention.