Effects of Users' Perceived Loneliness and Stress on Online Game Loyalty

摘要

Online games become very popular as the Internet permeates down to all ranks of our lives. However, contrary to our common sense that those users loyal to the online games will just enjoy the games only for the sake of pleasure, user's perceived loneliness and stress are believed to affect their loyalty for the games. However, this research issue remains unexplored sufficiently in the fields of IS studies. In this sense, this paper proposes a new research model in which users' perceived loneliness and stress have relationships to game loyalty through other experiential factors such as flow, enjoyment, and character identification. To prove the validity of our proposed research model, empirical analysis was performed with 187 valid questionnaires using PLS (Partial Least Square). Results revealed that the proposed research model is statistically significant, and loneliness and perceive stress hold crucial position in the users' loyalty to games.