A Factor-Based Exploration of Player´s Continuation Desire in Free-to-Play Mobile Games

This paper explores the concept of Continuation Desire further by investigating the behavioral intent of players’ desire to keep playing. User experience is a complex, multifaceted topic, which is commonly studied through different aspects namely engagement, continuation desire, immersion, flow experience, motivation and enjoyment yet it is difficult to measure. These concepts were conceptualized into different factors and thereby it was identified which of them are related. This resulted in a synthesized model that was based on the Theory of Planned Behavior model. This model takes into account the perceived user experience factors relevant for Continuation Desire and then attempts to predict players’ intention to continue playing. Structural Equation Modeling analysis was performed to validate the model and to predict the intention of continuation desire. At the same time, exploring why people continue playing, based on experiments using Candy Crush Saga, one of the most popular Free-to-Play mobile games worldwide. The findings indicate that motivation is an important factor of Continuation Desire in Free-to-Play mobile games, with engagement, enjoyment and flow being less important. This paper contributes an early work of a factor-based exploration of measuring user experience and their continuation desire. Introduction and Motivation User experience in games is an inherently complex construct which is challenging to measure in its entirety in practice, and therefore often interpreted or defined through different aspects or factors such as fun, affect, engagement, (Cowley et al. 2008) flow (Weibel et al. 2008), or enjoyment (Klimmt, Vorderer, and Ritterfeld, 2004). These concepts are used to either measure components of the user experience in games, or as proxy measures of the user experience. Regardless, user experience is complicated to measure, even with psychophysiological methods, (Drachen et al. 2010). Copyright © 2015, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. The Free-to-Play (F2P) mobile market today forms a major component of the digital games market worldwide (TIGA, 2013), and mobile devices currently form the most used gaming platform (Populus, 2014). Within F2P mobile games, continuation desire (Schoenau-Fog, 2011, 2014) is one of the most desirable components of user experience to understand in the specific context of F2P mobile games, because these games live or die financially based on their ability to keep players engaged (Luton, 2013) (Fields and Cotton, 2014). The F2P sector of the games industry has a comparatively strong history of employing telemetry-based experiments such as split-level testing and behavioral analytics in general (Seif El-Nasr, Drachen, and Cannossa, 2013), such methods generally only permits inference of user experience-related issues (i.e. using e.g. progress in the game as indicator of user experience). In essence, behavioral telemetry (Tychsen, 2008) does not consistently offer deep insights into the root causes of player behavior. Thus, this paper’s motivation is to explore deeper roots of continuation desire in F2P mobile games. In this paper the concept of Continuation Desire is explored in the specific context of F2P mobile games, using Candy Crush Saga as the case. Candy Crush Saga is a match-three puzzle game released by King in April 2012 for Facebook, and later the same year for mobile devices. It is one of the world ́s most played F2P games with over 100 million download. Potential motivators for Continuation Desire identified in previous work on user experience in games, such as engagement, motivation, flow experience and enjoyment, were synthesized into a model based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991). Following an experiment with (n=31) participants, Structural Equation Modeling was performed to evaluate the model and potential predictors for Continuation Desire. The results indicate that various types of motivation impact directly on Continuation Desire, with “real-time” components of the user experience – engagement, enjoyment and flow – being less important. The paper contributes an early version of a Player Modeling: Papers from the AIIDE 2015 Workshop