The Motivation to Play Scale (MOPS) - Introducing a Validated Measure of Gaming Motivation

With billions of players worldwide, playing video games has become ubiquitous in everyday life. The growing interest and increasing diversity of video games has also raised scientific interest in the question of why people play. Existing measures, however, are mostly focused on specific theoretical foundations (e.g., Ryan et al., 2006), genres or games (e.g., Fuster et al., 2012). Furthermore, despite a large number of existing scales, there is often a lack of adequate validation. Therefore, the Motivation to Play Scale (MOPS) that aims to provide a comprehensive scale to assess general gaming motivation was developed and validated in three studies. Instead of designing novel items from scratch, an item pool was created in Study 1 based on a systematic bottom-up literature search of existing measures. In Study 2, we thoroughly evaluated the dimensionality of the item pool in an online survey (N1 = 562) and used exploratory factor analysis that resulted in a 10-factor structure (i.e., creativity/exploration, escapism, competition, prestige, enjoyment, achievement, socializing, boredom, aggression, and skill) and a total of 58 items. Furthermore, convergent and discriminant validity of the questionnaire was tested. In Study 3, a second online survey (N2 = 732) was used to cross-validate the factor structure using confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory structural equation modeling. Furthermore, latent profile analysis identified four distinct gamer types (i.e., casual player, high performer, crafter, and highly involved player) that were meaningfully related to demographic and gaming-related variables. Overall, results from the present study suggest that the MOPS is a reliable and valid questionnaire to assess general gaming motivation.

With billions of players worldwide, playing video games has become ubiquitous in everyday life. The growing interest and increasing diversity of video games has also raised scientific interest in the question of why people play. Existing measures, however, are mostly focused on specific theoretical foundations (e.g., Ryan et al., 2006), genres or games (e.g., Fuster et al., 2012). Furthermore, despite a large number of existing scales, there is often a lack of adequate validation. Therefore, the Motivation to Play Scale (MOPS) that aims to provide a comprehensive scale to assess general gaming motivation was developed and validated in three studies. Instead of designing novel items from scratch, an item pool was created in Study 1 based on a systematic bottom-up literature search of existing measures. In Study 2, we thoroughly evaluated the dimensionality of the item pool in an online survey (N1 = 562) and used exploratory factor analysis that resulted in a 10-factor structure (i.e., creativity/exploration, escapism, competition, prestige, enjoyment, achievement, socializing, boredom, aggression, and skill) and a total of 58 items. Furthermore, convergent and discriminant validity of the questionnaire was tested. In Study 3, a second online survey (N2 = 732) was used to cross-validate the factor structure using confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory structural equation modeling. Furthermore, latent profile analysis identified four distinct gamer types (i.e., casual player, high performer, crafter, and highly involved player) that were meaningfully related to demographic and gaming-related variables. Overall, results from the present study suggest that the MOPS is a reliable and valid questionnaire to assess general gaming motivation.