The Comparative Self: Understanding the Motivation to Play and the Subsequent Video Game Use

Abstract

Existing video game research postulates a rather static concept of the personality of players. The study at hand uses a more fluid understanding of players’ personality based on the assumptions of the social identity approach. Thereby, we aim to illustrate that the self-concept is a richer approach than the widespread big five taxonomy as an operationalization of players’ personality to explain the motivation to play and video game use. Using structural equation modelling, our results show support for this assumption in two instances. First, we show that the self-concept explains bigger shares of variance of the motivation to play. Second, we illustrate that the self-concept predicts video game use in a more holistic fashion. We discuss the contribution of our analyses to the research on players’ personality, the motivation to play, and on video game use, and identify potential paths for future research.