ABSTRACT
Gaming research has become increasingly important over the last few years. Universities are giving scholarships to skilled eSports (aka electronic sports) players (Tassi, 2015). Major League Gaming (aka MLG) is a professional sports market in the United States and across the globe via the Internet (“Major League Gaming,” 2015). Businesses and schools are using principles associated with gaming (e.g., leadership, economics and time management) to create more positive user experiences, overcome learning disabilities and solve nancial crises, to name a few (Annetta, 2010; Dennis & O’Toole, 2014). Understanding how and why games are played, who plays them as well as how globally diverse groups of players may dier from one another, allows developers to make increasingly marketable games, provides a basis for understanding intergroup dynamics between gamers and non-gamers and allows researchers to understand the increasingly complex way in which people continue to experience entertainment. Where once much of the research revolved around gaming and resulting behaviours, researchers now seek to understand cultural and individual aspects of gamers, gaming as a subculture and how game content aects the gaming experience. Personality and motivations for game choices, subculture norms and content diversity represent only a few of the gaming aspects currently examined in psychological research.
