Rethinking Fantasy as a Contributor to Intrinsic Motivation in Digital Gameplay

Playing digital games is a part of life for current natives. Games make people engrossed, and are optimized environments where fun prevails. Of making people motivated in gameplay, fantasy is a paramount element. Research has discovered that fantasy plays a critical role in enhancing intrinsic motivation. This chapter thus revisits the role of fantasy while playing digital games, focusing on what brings a state of fantasy in a gaming world. Specifically, the purpose of this chapter is to probe factors creating fantasy state while gameplay. To this end, 153 junior high students aged from l1 to 13 were participated in this study, and 35 commercial off-the-shelf games including most game genres were utilized. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was employed to extract the factors making fantasy state while gameplay. As a result, four factors were extracted as fantasy components, and labeled as identification, imagination, analogy, and satisfaction. By thinking about such subcomponents, fantasy in gaming can be understood as the individualized psychological state, which is satisfied with certain gaming situation and/or events being evoked by identifying in the game world from both extrinsic and intrinsic stimuli.