FEMALE DATING SIMULATOR GAMERS’MOTIVATIONS AND DEVELOPING PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS WITH GAME CHARACTERS

This study tests Chinese female gamers develop parasocial relationships with game characters and explore their motivations for playing a popular Chinese dating game – Mr Love: Queen’s Choice. This thesis contains the parasocial relationships theory, uses and gratifications theory, and reviewing the development of female-oriented dating simulators, which is a type of video game with dating and romantic development relationships as the primary purpose. A survey in China with a sample size of 290 participants were recruited to test the research questions and hypotheses, and 10 people were recruited to pre-test the survey questions. This study found that game exposures related to parasocial relationships with game characters. The study also identified three motivators that influence people to play female-oriented dating simulators: gratification, social interactions, and escapism. These key findings provide direction for future academic research and game developers on the female-oriented video games. This research is able to provide a better understanding of how two dimensions – Chinese gamers’ emotional attachment (parasocial relationships) with male game characters and three motivations (gratification, social interactions, and escapism) – influence the dating video game playing, an new insight has not been examined previously in the previous game genre literature