Towards an Understanding of The Motivations to Play Games on Smartphones

Smartphones are rapidly becoming ubiquitous personal items that continue to evolve and shape our consumption experiences through the applications (apps) used on them, almost half of which are games. The mobile game ‘Angry Birds’ has been downloaded over one billion times. These consumption patterns continue to define what is fast becoming an ‘emerging ludic society’ (Kallio, Mäyrä, & Kaipainen, 2011) and implications for marketers lie in the growing area of gamification (Deterding, Dixon, & Khaled, 2011). Video gaming is now a social norm (Kallio et al., 2011; Mäyrä, 2008). This research seeks to fill a gap in the consumer behaviour literature by providing a conceptual model to explain motivation as the antecedents of play on smartphones. Since the continuing cultural penetration of video games is inevitable, employing new theoretical models and empirically exploring these domains becomes ever more important in order to inform more effective health and education interventions as well as advancing the basic science of humans at play (Przybylski, Rigby, & Ryan, 2010).