Search results

The social and economic importance esports has gained over the past decades has led to a quickly evolving academic interest in the topic. Yet, current perspectives on esports frequently are not precise enough, too context-specific and/or focus on the question whether esports is sports or not. This means that no precise structural concept has been provided thus far. Such a conceptualization as well as a categorization of esports and related types of video gaming are provided in this paper.

This paper is based on a narrative review considering academic literature from 2000 to 2021 and publications of relevant esports organizations. The review is conceptually extended by structural parallels to traditional sports.

The central outcome of this research is conceptualizing esports as a victory-driven, organized performance comparison of exclusively human players playing video games in a competitive setting. This comparison is based solely on the performance achieved during a defined time frame according to fixed rules with comparably equal team (starting) conditions. This conceptualization is embedded in a general categorization of video gaming based on structural similarities with and differences to esports. Moreover, characteristics that were rejected in regards to the conceptualization and the categorization are discussed.

This paper provides a comprehensive categorization of esports and other types of video gaming based on structural similarities and differences. It is thus of high relevance for academia and sport management practice alike and can further the development in both fields.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of alcohol sponsorship-linked advertising through esports upon young gaming audiences and how gaming behaviours affect advertising response.

A cross-sectional survey study was employed to examine the prevalence and nature of alcohol advertising in esports, and the impact of esports participation upon young audiences' consumption and preferences concerning alcohol. Survey data were collected from 976 young Australian gamers aged between 16 and 34 years (58.9% male) using online questionnaires.

Results revealed a vulnerability to alcohol sponsorship and advertising among 25 to 34-year-old and heavy gamer cohorts. As predicted, heavy gamers were more receptive to alcohol advertising in terms of awareness, preference and consumption while gaming than casual gamers.

This research advances theories of consumer behaviour and advertising exposure situated in a new landscape of converging virtual and real experiential marketing. It also provides much-needed evidence to guide marketing strategy to the next-generation audiences and regulation of new and burgeoning digital platforms. Our research also highlights a need for policy to address the burgeoning, largely unregulated nature of online gaming.

This research provides the first empirical evidence of the impacts of alcohol-linked sponsorship in esports upon young playing and streaming audiences. It informs marketing strategy and policy in relation to the rapidly growing, potentially vulnerable online competitive gaming audience.

The theoretical basis for this case is a focus on strategic positioning as related to Porter’s generic strategies. The case describes GameStop’s previous differentiation approach, executed through physical stores and knowledgeable staff. With technological shifts and the introduction of digital downloads, this strategy is less effective. The case requires students to consider how GameStop might revise its generic strategy based on the new competitive landscape in which it operates.

In writing this case, the research team conducted thorough analysis through primary data collection in stores as well as secondary data collection through the use of market research tools, such as IBIS World, MergentOnline, S&P Net Advantage, and academic journals, trade magazines, and websites.

With high uncertainty shown by stakeholders about the future of GameStop coupled with falling share prices, the company must find a way to stay in play given the rapidly growing digital gaming market. As it planned to close at least 150 of its 7,500 stores, the company was starting to take measures to reduce operational costs and restructure to sectors that best fit consumer interests. GameStop’s core competencies were no longer aligned with market conditions, and its executives were now questioning where it could expand the organization’s operations as they focused on finding untapped areas of the market that have an opportunity for a new competitive advantage. Given its unique market share in gaming memorabilia and trade-in values, students are tasked with finding GameStop’s existing competitive advantages or identifying potential new ones that can be leveraged in a technology-driven industry.

This case could be taught at either the graduate or undergraduate level strategy course. At the undergraduate level, it would be best taught when discussing industry life cycle or competitive dynamics. At the graduate level, MBAs could discuss competitive dynamics facing GameStop and how it might find areas for future strategic growth.

The purpose of this paper is to adopt a critical relational dialectics framework to identify and explore gender discursive struggles about social inclusion observed in an online gaming community, in South Africa.

The paper uses a technique called contrapuntal analysis to identify and explore competing discourses in over 200 messages on gender struggles about social inclusion posted in the local community’s gamer discussion board, based on seven threads initiated by women gamer activists.

The findings show how four interrelated gender discursive struggles about social inclusion and social exclusion animated the meanings of online gamer relations: dominance vs equality, stereotyping vs diversity, competitiveness vs cooperativeness and privilege vs empowerment.

Game designers should reinforce more accurate and positive stereotypes to cater for the rapidly growing female gamer segment joining the online gaming market and to develop a less chauvinistic and more diversely representative online gaming community. Enlightened gamers should exercise greater solidarity in fighting for gender equality in online gaming communities.

The critical relational dialectics analysis adopted in this study offers a promising avenue to understand and critique the discursive struggles that arise when online gamers from the different gender groups relate. The findings highlight the unequal discursive power and privilege of many white male gamers when discussing social inclusion. Advancing our understanding of these discursive struggles creates the possibilities for improving social inclusion in online gaming communities.

Serious games are computer games with a primary purpose of educating or training while also entertaining. Literature has established that serious games can enhance learning in the classroom and improve student engagement. However, few studies have analyzed the factors that inhibit the adoption of serious games. The current study extends research by analyzing inhibitors of serious game adoption in an introductory accounting course for MBA students. The accounting mobile challenge (AMC) is a mobile accounting trivia game which utilizes both competitive and collaborative features in gameplay. Results demonstrated that students who identified as collaborative engaged in a greater amount of gameplay while those who identified as competitive did not. Furthermore, independent learners, as well as those who utilized mobile technology more outside of class, more readily adopted the technology. Utilizing the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989) as a framework, it was predicted that the perceived value of the AMC would increase as students played the game more. Results support this prediction. Finally, a “discouragement effect” was detected as a major inhibitor to utilizing the technology as students who did poorly gave up and discontinued playing the game. This research contributes to the emerging literature on the inhibitors to serious game adoption in accounting.

Team social capital (TSC) has been attracting increasing research attention aiming to explore team effectiveness through within- and cross-team resource conduits. This study bridges two disconnected theories – TSC and evolutionary theory – to examine gaming clans and analyzes mechanisms of the clans' TSC building from an evolutionary perspective.

This research draws longitudinal data from a sample of gaming teams (N = 1,267) from anonymized player data from the game World of Tanks spanning 32 months. The authors explored teams' evolutionary patterns using hidden Markov models and applied longitudinal multilevel modeling to test hypotheses.

The results showed that teams of different sizes and levels of evolutionary fitness vary in team closure and bridging social capital. The authors also found that larger teams are more effective than smaller ones. The positive association between team-bridging social capital and effectiveness is more substantial for smaller teams.

This research advances the theoretical development of TSC by including the constructs of teams' evolutionary status when analyzing strategic social capital building. Adding to existing literature studying the outcome of TSC, this research also found a moderating effect of team size between TSC and effectiveness. Finally, this study also contributes to a longitudinal view of TSC and found significant evolutionary patterns of teams' membership, TSC, and effectiveness.

This study aims to verify the antecedents influencing mobile gamers’ intentions to purchase mobile phones. To this end, the constructs price–quality relationship, price sensitivity, perceived quality, identification with the group of gamers and referrals from other gamers were identified in the literature.

Data were collected through an online questionnaire with 335 consumers. The model was tested using partial least squares.

It was verified that the price–quality relationship directly influences mobile gamers' intentions to purchase mobile phones. Also, it was observed that price sensitivity of mobile gamers directly influences the price–quality relationship and indirectly influences the intention to purchase mobile phones to play games. It was further verified that this price sensitivity is directly influenced by the perceived quality of mobile gaming devices. Finally, it was observed that referrals from other gamers directly influences the perceived quality and onès identification with the group of gamers.

This study concluded that developing strategies focused on prices of mobile phones gamers use to play games tends to influence mobile gamers' purchase intentions. This paper extends the study of mobile device purchase behavior, uniting constructs studied separately and proposing connections not yet tested, assisting in the theoretical understanding of the factors that contribute to the intention to purchase mobile devices.

This study is theoretically justified for four reasons: it focused on a specific group of consumers, mobile gamers, which is a constantly growing audience; it brought an innovative model, testing the influence of the perceived quality of mobile gaming devices on the price sensitivity of mobile gamers; there are spaces for new research on mobile device purchase intention; and it may assist in the theoretical understanding of the factors contributing to mobile device purchase intention.

Adopting efficient marketing strategies is a challenging task in a competitive market place involving complex marketing planning, techniques and mechanisms to identify the best course of action under these circumstances and finding optimal solutions or stable outcomes. Decisions and strategies of competitors in the market influence the selection of the appropriate marketing strategy. The main purpose of this paper is to develop a mathematical methodology based on the game theory approach for planning optimal marketing-mix strategies in dynamic competitive markets, taking into account strategic foresight and interaction effects.

The game theory approach, as a decision-making tool in conflict situations, is suggested for planning and adopting optimal marketing strategy. The main intellectual attraction of the game theory is essentially a question of how to act in gaming situations against highly rational opponents A kind of static, finite and non-cooperative game analytics approach has been developed for this issue, and the proposed model has been implemented to design optimal marketing strategies for two top brands of the automotive parts market in Iran.

The findings of this study show that the optimal marketing-mix strategy for brand A is pricing and for brand B is the product strategy.

Game theory and the Nash equilibrium model can provide a practical approach to find and adopt the right strategy, know competitors' movements and strategies and get more profit.

The integration of the game theory approach into the marketing mix framework has been adopted as a generalized model for marketing strategy planning and analysis as well as to resolve some shortcomings of the marketing mix framework. The Nash equilibrium model has been used to analyze the results. The incorporation of game theory into marketing models has the potential to enrich the scope of marketing modeling.

Local public officials rely on tax and non-tax incentive packages to develop their economies. No conclusive evidence supports the economic improvement incentives afford. We investigate, with an experimental approach, the political reasons public officials use tax incentives. The experiment uses simulation gaming to model local economic development as an auction, in that way permitting us to compare the impact that motives, goals, and contexts have on outcomes. Our findings suggest that the majority of economic development competitors fall victim to the “winner’s curse”-overestimating and overbidding the potential payoff for business development.

Playing video gaming is one of the most popular forms of leisure activities. This study looks into a specific video game genre, under the category of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games. The purpose of this research is to investigate the factors that lead to the consumption of MOBA games. Three factors, imaginal, emotional and sensory experiences, are investigated through an integration of the hedonic consumption model, Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Uses and Gratification Theory (UGT).

The study analyses a sample of 292 MOBA game players using the PLS-SEM model. The study comprises two stages; in the first stage, an estimation model was used to test the constructs' quality and legitimacy. In the second stage, we assessed the theoretical model to test the relationship between the principle constructs.

The study found that factors related to emotional experiences, namely enjoyment, emotional involvement, and arousal, led to greater intention to play MOBA games. Similarly, two factors related to imaginal experiences, escapism and role projection, also positively impacted while fantasy carried a negative impact. The study also found that sensory experiences had a significant positive impact on the intention to play MOBA games. Lastly, a positive correlation was also found between the intention to use and usage behavior in MOBA games.

This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of the playful-consumption experiences of pleasure-oriented information systems (I.S.) that is MOBA games that derive behavioral intention to play MOBA games, which in turn determines the usage behavior of MOBA players. The study also incorporates the uses and gratification theory to uncover the needs and experiences that trigger MOBA games' behavioral intention and its further impact on gamers' usage behavior. The study also presents useful insights for game developers and other relevant stakeholders in game development.