The role of emotions in game experience: linking emotions, game experience and return intentions

Abstract

The focus of many marketing studies is to understand the needs and anticipations of consumers and how they can be provided with positive experiences. In their efforts to understand the consumer, consumer behaviour researchers generally adopt a cognitive perspective, which propagates a rational, information processing approach to consumer behaviour (O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy, 2003). However, a unitary theory of consumption behaviour is undesirable because this restricts the way in which consumption behaviour can be studied (Foxall, 1990). As such, researchers need to use alternative theories in order to widen the scope of knowledge on consumer behaviour. Furthermore, within the field of consumer behaviour, emotional experience of consumers has become a prominent field of investigation. Richins (1997) concluded that the importance of emotions in consumer behaviour is well established. The question then is how researchers can attempt to understand the emotional experiences of consumers. This research is an attempt to understand consumption emotions of consumers with specific relevance to sports consumption. It uses an alternative psychological theory, personal construct theory, with which to understand and measure consumption emotions. Mixed methods research design is used comprising of repertory grid interviews and a quantitative survey to identify and understand the relevant emotions with regards to domestic one-day cricket spectators. The findings here show that six emotions are relevant in the cricket spectating context with most of these emotions having a strong relationship with both game experience and return intentions. This study contributes to existing knowledge on consumption emotions by demonstrating the use of an alternative approach to both measure and study consumption emotions. By using personal construct theory, the research has helped overcome some prevalent issues within consumption emotions literature. It has shown that emotions need to be understood at an individual level. Furthermore, it has demonstrated that rationality and emotions are part of the same process and provide support for conceptualising satisfaction as an emotion