The Effects of Trust and Enjoyment on Intention to Play Online Games

As online games grow in importance as an electronic commerce application, researchers and practitioners increasingly believe that understanding online game player behavior is critical to the success of online game vendors. In an attempt to gain new insights into the determinants of behavioral intention to play online games, we propose a theoretical model that augments the theory of reasoned action (TRA) with two new constructs, trust and enjoyment. Within the model framework, we investigate the impact of trust and enjoyment on behavioral intention as well as on behavioral attitude. Our proposed model is tested by using questionnaire responses of 253 online game players. As hypothesized, attitude, enjoyment, and subjective norms predict intention, and enjoyment significantly affects attitude. The results also show that trust affects intention only indirectly through attitude. The paper contributes by highlighting the roles of trust and enjoyment in the online gaming context.