We built a scale that measures what motivates people to play, and compared the structure for competitive and noncompetitive gamers.
Berzenski, S. R., Shulze, J., Leitao, M. R., & Ruvalcaba, O. (2025). Motivations for Gaming Scale: A comparison of competitive and noncompetitive gamers. Journal of Electronic Gaming and Esports, 3, 1–13. doi:10.1123/jege.2024-0026
572 adults who play video games answered an online survey. 67.8% were women and 64.3% were Hispanic. They came from mTurk and an undergraduate pool.
We split the sample into one group to find the factors and another to confirm them.
N = 572
gamers across the exploratory and confirmatory samples
mTurk plus undergraduates.
Among competitive gamers, enjoyment split into Diversion and Mastery. Among noncompetitive gamers, purpose split into Occupation and Identity.
Challenge and Competition appeared in both groups.
4 motivations
Challenge, Competition, Enjoyment and Purpose
Enjoyment and Purpose each split in one group.
What to look for. The groups share Challenge and Competition. They differ in how the other two motivations divide.
Two motivations appeared for all gamers.
Enjoyment separated into two motivations.
Purpose separated into two motivations.
One scale, two profiles. Researchers, clinicians and industry teams can use the scale to describe and serve different gaming groups.
Limits. This page rests on the abstract alone. Loadings, reliabilities and fit indices are in the paper, and I have not redrawn them here.