A formal anthropological view of motivation models of problematic MMO play: Achievement, social, and immersion factors in the context of culture

TLDR

Yee (2006) identified achievement, social, and immersion as key motivational factors in MMORPGs, and later work linked these factors to problematic or addictive play. The study investigates problematic play in World of Warcraft by surveying 252 players and integrating ethnographic and interview data. Using psychological anthropology, the authors reconceptualized achievement, social, and immersion factors in terms of cultural consonance, overvalued virtual relationships, and dissociative identity blurring to test culture’s role in problematic MMO play. Results show that culturally sensitive measures outperform Yee’s original factors in predicting problematic play, highlighting sociocultural influences.

Abstract

Yee (2006) found three motivational factors— achievement, social, and immersion—underlying play in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (“MMORPGs” or “MMOs” for short). Subsequent work has suggested that these factors foster problematic or addictive forms of play in online worlds. In the current study, we used an online survey of respondents ( N = 252), constructed and also interpreted in reference to ethnography and interviews, to examine problematic play in the World of Warcraft ( WoW; Blizzard Entertainment, 2004–2013). We relied on tools from psychological anthropology to reconceptualize each of Yee’s three motivational factors in order to test for the possible role of culture in problematic MMO play: (a) For achievement, we examined how “cultural consonance” with normative understandings of success might structure problematic forms of play; (b) for social, we analyzed the possibility that developing overvalued virtual relationships that are cutoff from offline social interactions might further exacerbate problematic play; and (c) in relation to immersion, we examined how “dissociative” blurring of actual- and virtual-world identities and experiences might contribute to problematic patterns. Our results confirmed that compared to Yee’s original motivational factors, these culturally sensitive measures better predict problematic forms of play, pointing to the important role of sociocultural factors in structuring online play.