사용자의 특성이 온라인 게임 충성도에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구: 자극추구성향을 중심으로

In recent years, the market for online games has become an important part of the entertainment industry. For more competitive game development, the game industries need to understand why certain games are perceived more attractive by gamers and why they show such a high level of loyalty to a certain game. Previous research on the online game loyalty tends to focus on the gamers’ mechanical interactions, which have been identified as facilitating factors for increasing the level of gamers’ flow that positively influences their loyalty. Also, previous research attempts to examine the relationship between the gamers’ environmental factors and their loyalty, neglecting to examine gamers’ different reaction patterns to the contents in the games. This study, therefore, attempts to investigate the impacts of gamers’ characteristics on the flows and loyalty in the online game environments focusing on the gamers’ sensation seeking tendency. Zuckerman(1979) defined sensation seeking as “the need for varied, novel, and complex sensations and experiences and the willingness to take physical and social risks for the sake of such experience.” Sensation seeking has emerged as an important factor for explaining a variety of behaviors including internet use and video games. This study intends to apply the Zuckerman’s sensation seeking theory to the context of the online game loyalty in order to examine the differential effects of the loyalty factors identified in the past. Hence, a sample of 332 gamers has been classified into two groups depending on their sensation seeking level, and a multi-group structural equation model(MSEM) has been tested in order to compare the impacts of loyalty factors between two groups. Results show that flow experience, which has been identified as the most important antecedent of gamers’ loyalty by previous research, may have differential impacts on the loyalty depending on the gamers’ sensation seeking tendency. The impact of flow experience on the loyalty has been significant for the group revealing a low level of sensation seeking, while not significant for other group revealing a high level of sensation seeking. This result indicates that gamers who tend to seek high level of sensation might switch to other games that satisfy their optimum level of sensation, rather than stay with lowered level of flow. On the other hand the word of mouth shows consistent impacts on loyalty regardless of gamers’ sensation seeking tendency. This indicates that in the online game environments the social interactions through the community activities might have greater impacts on the gamers’ loyalty than the mechanical interaction factors like flow experience. Game developers, therefore, need to continuously provide new contents and environments to match the gamers’required sensation level and support cyber communities for maintaining a good sense of the word of mouth.