Sociaal contact in een MMORPG: een exploratief onderzoek naar de motivaties voor het spelen van World of Warcraft vanuit de Uses & Gratifications benadering

The results of a study on motivations for playing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG), c.q. World of Warcraft (WoW), on 1691 garners have been described in this article. The research hypothesis states that the social contact in-game is the main motivation of playing WoW. After a factor analysis, eight motivations can be defined: 'escapism' (alpha=0,694), 'arousal'(alpha=0,573), 'social contact in WoW' (alpha=0,794), 'challenge' (alpha=0,758), 'immersion' (alpha=0,765), 'skills' (alpha=0,907), 'social contact in real life' (alpha=0,739), 'strong competition' (alpha=0,771). 'Social contact in WoW' ends on the third place. Still, 89% of the respondents think that the multiplayer aspect is important. Two other dimensions have been found: 'character identification' (alpha=0,749) and 'character importance' (alpha=0,826). By distinguishing a group 'High Character Involvement' and 'Low Character Involvement' there have been found interesting differences with regard to the motivations