Co-Creating Value in Video Games: The Impact of Gender Identity and Motivations on Video Game Engagement and Purchase Intentions

When games were first developed for in-home use, they were primarily targeted almost exclusively at children and males. However, today’s marketplace manifests a more diverse population plays Internet-enabled games that can be played virtually anywhere. The average gamer is now 30 years old. Many gamers, obviously, are much older. Yet more strikingly, and more germane to this study’s purpose, 47% of the U.S. gamer population is female, as compared to 40% in 2010. Despite these trends the gaming industry remains a male-dominated culture. The marketer’s job is to facilitate game engagement and to motivate gamers to play. The notion of “engagement” is not new in business. The term was developed in the last decade. Many studies were devoted to understand, explain, and define the term. It suggests that within interactive, dynamic business environments, consumer engagement (CE) represents a strategic position that companies can use to enhance their sales growth, competitive advantage, and profitability. Moreover, there are three levels of engagement in any experiential consumption (i.e., playing video game): presence, flow, and psychological absorption. The findings of this study affirm that consumer engagement, including presence, flow and psychological absorption are explanatory factors that impact gamer’s purchase intentions. Our results show that consumers experience different mental engagement in an interactive environment (i.e., playing video games) compared to passive environments (i.e., visiting a website). These findings change our understanding of consumers’ engagement and flow state. We also found that male and female gamers experience different engagement level. However, we did not find a significant result that masculinity and femininity traits impact gamers’ engagement or intention. We argue that macroeconomic factors results in sales fluctuation may have resulted in reject in this hypothesis. Thus, marketers shed a light into the consumer’s interactive environment and flow states in that environments. Consumers not only determine the value in using a product as Vargo and Lusch suggested, but they also create that value. Also, consumer experience is an ongoing process that does not have a specific point to start, making the value creation a temporally accumulative process that includes past, present, and future experience. Therefore, the value created by consumers is not created while physically interacting with a device to play, but it may include imagined and indirect interaction with the product. Therefore, consumers (i.e., gamers) need to maintain a balance between presence and psychological absorption (i.e., flow) to get the best experience in play video gaming. Empirical evidence suggest that consumers’ flow state engagement is the most important variable in determining their ensuing purchase intention for video games, regardless of game genre