Author:

Keywords:

Social Cognitive Theory, Player Cessation, Model of Media Attendance, Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA), Retention

Abstract:

While digital game consumption has moved away from bricks-and-mortar retail to application stores and online platforms like Steam, an increasingly competitive world-wide marketplace with new marketing and business models has developed. The revenues of these new models (such as subscription-based and freemium models, free to play models, etc.) rather depend on the player’s desire to continue to play than on a single purchase (Feng, Brandt, & Saha, 2007). Yet, retaining players in an environment where (free) games are at the fingertips of every player is difficult (Hadiji et al., 2014). Having a clear understanding of why players start, continue or cease to play has therefore become of vital importance to the game industry (Debeauvais, Lopes, Yee, & Ducheneaut, 2014). Beyond the commercial value, the academic study of player retention and cessation within digital games has a broader, social relevance as well. For instance, digital game-based learning is increasingly being implemented in a variety of sectors including education, workplace training and health. Understanding why an interactive training is stopped and predicting dropout would help to improve existing training programs or cater to the needs of specific subgroups with high risk for dropout (All, Nuñez Castellar, & Van Looy, 2015). A better understanding of player cessation, with improved techniques for measuring and predicting dropout, will also support efforts to prevent excessive game use and promote responsible video game behavior (Kuss, Louws, & Wiers, 2012). While motivations to start playing digital games have been studied across different genres and within different theoretical frameworks (De Grove, Cauberghe, & Van Looy, 2014; Sherry, Lucas, Greenberg, & Lachlan, 2006; Yee, 2006), persistent and especially cessation behavior is rarely studied in digital games research (Neys, Jansz, & Tan, 2014). Based on the Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986) and the Model of Media Attendance (LaRose & Eastin, 2004), this study starts to fill this research gap by examining possible determinants for digital game play cessation. We focus on a specific genre, namely Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games or MOBA’s, a popular though rarely studied genre (Park & Kim, 2014). A qualitative research design has been adopted to explore player cessation in detail, with an emphasis on digital game motivations, flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), and both parental (Nikken & Jansz, 2014; De Ferrerre & Van Looy, 2014) and peer mediation (Shin & Ismail, 2014; Nathanson, 2001). We conducted in-depth interviews (N=15) with adolescents and young adults between the ages of twelve and twenty-two. The results indicate that the discontinuation of starting motivations (e.g., no more challenge or competition), contextual elements (e.g., parents rules of game time, following friends to other games), game-related elements (e.g., availability of another or better game, no more new content in the game, bugs and faults), negative experiences (e.g., saturation, frustration), and physiological reasons (e.g., tiredness and being hungry) are important determinants of player cessation. Future research should further look into player cessation for a better understanding of this understudied behavioral aspect of digital game play, from an integrated perspective to pin-point the predictive power of player, game content and contextual factors alike. In our discussion we propose a research agenda for both quantitative and qualitative follow-up research.