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USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Gaming

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Avatar Self-Identification, Self-Esteem, And Perceived Social Capital In The Real World: A Study Of World Of Warcraft Players And Their Avatars, Melissa Watts Mar 2016

Avatar Self-Identification, Self-Esteem, And Perceived Social Capital In The Real World: A Study Of World Of Warcraft Players And Their Avatars, Melissa Watts

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the relationship between people who play massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) and their avatars, as well as the impact on players’ self-esteem and perceived social capital in the real world. To examine these influences of online video gameplay, this research investigated gamers who play the popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft (WoW). This study employed an online survey made available on Reddit, a widely-used news, entertainment, and social-networking website, in which all the content is user-generated. The research questionnaire was intended to reveal the bond between MMORPG players and their avatars; the study examined how this relationship …


An Examination Of Motives, Experiences, And Behaviors Of Mmorpg Players, Theresa Lynn Woods May 2014

An Examination Of Motives, Experiences, And Behaviors Of Mmorpg Players, Theresa Lynn Woods

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are growing in popularity and use worldwide. This study seeks to explore the motivations and experiences of MMORPG players through an extensive online survey with more than a thousand participants (n=1,422). The findings support a complex relationship between the variables, including the direct effects of motivations and flow on the time invested by players in MMORPG play, as well as the mediated effects of motivation via flow. Causal relationships are examined in addition to the significance of direct and indirect effects on frequency of play, yielding several significant results, including (1) the overwhelming importance …


Gaming Literacy: Construct Validation And Scale Construction, Kenneth Allen Rosenberg Jan 2011

Gaming Literacy: Construct Validation And Scale Construction, Kenneth Allen Rosenberg

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the first attempt to construct a standardized measure of literacy for the medium of video games, filling a gap in the literature by synthesizing various items of skills, behaviors, and affective components from existent studies and determining their correlations through analyzation of survey data. The five categories that were derived from conceptual review and factor analysis have high measures of internal consistency: Information and Systems Management; Exploration and Enjoyment; Teamwork; Design; and Socialization. To test for external consistency and reliability, the proposed gaming literacy model was compared to the Novak and Hoffman (1997) construction of flow, using …