Media Enjoyment and Uses and

Media enjoyment is theorized by synthesizing empirical literature from uses and gratifications with Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory. This article argues that enjoyment of media results from a flow experience realized when media message content balances with individual ability to inter-pret that message. Further, it theorizes that media experience, along with individual differences in cognitive abilities, facilitates or prevents flow state in media users. Therefore, it is a balance between individual differ-ences in cognitive abilities and media message challenges that explains enjoyment of media use. The authors offer the case of video game usage as an exemplar, and examples of cognitive tasks are provided and linked to game genre content. Over the 70 years during which scholars have researched the uses and gratifications of media, hundreds of articles and book chapters have been written demonstrating the reasons a variety of people, from a vari-ety of nations, have used a variety of genres found in a variety of media. One of the oldest and most persistent research findings across all these studies is that people primarily use media for enjoyment. Although ro-bust, this finding has long been plagued with the criticism that the re-search tradition it comes from, uses and gratifications, is more descrip-tive than theoretical; more normative than explanatory. In other words, we know that people use media for enjoyment; we don’t know why. What does it mean to enjoy media? What is entertaining about media? Why do we spend so much time pursuing entertainment? Are we mind-lessly “amusing ourselves to death ” (Postman, 1986), or is there a deeper motivation behind this common form of human behavior? This article addresses this shortcoming in the literature by posing a theoretical mecha-nism that can be used to explain one of the most popular gratifications sought from media: enjoyment