Abstract
Social games have become popular along with the tremendous growth of social networking sites, esp. Facebook. There is a gap in literature on what motivates people to play Facebook games. This paper studies social games usage behavior of students. We focus on escapist reasons, based on Warmelink, Harteveld and Mayer’s framework (2009) of escapist motives, which identifies four main motives for playing on-line games: mundane breaking, stress relieving, pleasure seeking, and imagination conjuring. In the paper, we report preliminary findings from an exploratory questionnaire survey. Besides importance of escapist motives for playing Facebook and other on-line games, we investigate how they are linked to demographic data such as: age, gender, place of origin, along with other social interactions patterns and social network usage behavior, current gaming status and an estimate of gaming time. According to our study, only 10% of respondents, who have started to play Facebook games, continued to play them. The most important motives for playing games is mundane breaking, the second reason is pleasure seeking, the third is stress relieving, and the least important is imagination conjuring.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | 25th Bled eConference eDependability: Reliable and Trustworthy eStructures, eProcesses, eOperations and eServices for the Future |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Place of Publication | Bled, Slovenia |
| Publisher | University of Maribor |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Pages | 497-511 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-961-232-256-4 |
| Publication status | Published - 2012 |
| Externally published | Yes |