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Fanboys, competers, escapists and time-killers: a typology based on gamers' motivations for playing video games

Published: 10 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, the different general motivations of gamers for playing video games are explored. Surprisingly, to date little research has been devoted to the characterization of the gamer, based on general game motivations. By means of an online survey, we questioned 2985 Flemish gamers on 11 general game motivations. K-means clustering was used to distinguish four distinctive gamer profiles: the overall convinced gamer, the convinced competitive gamer, the escapist gamer and the pass-time gamer.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    DIMEA '08: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts
    September 2008
    551 pages
    ISBN:9781605582481
    DOI:10.1145/1413634
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 10 September 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. game motivations
    2. gamer typology
    3. video games

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    DIMEA '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 59 of 77 submissions, 77%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 59 of 77 submissions, 77%

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    • (2024)Participatory Minecraft mapping: Fostering students participation in disaster awarenessEntertainment Computing10.1016/j.entcom.2023.10060548(100605)Online publication date: Jan-2024
    • (2022)Player/User Types for GamificationHandbook of Research on Cross-Disciplinary Uses of Gamification in Organizations10.4018/978-1-7998-9223-6.ch003(62-85)Online publication date: 2022
    • (2022)Negativists, enthusiasts and others: a typology of players in free-to-play gamesMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-022-13647-982:5(7939-7960)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2022
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