Understanding MMORPG addiction is important to the scientific community for several reasons. MMORPG addiction is a serious societal issue (Hsu et al., 2009 Kim, Kim, Shim, Im, & Shon, 2013 You et al., 2017), and it deserves further attention from governments, game developers, and the scientific community. Given the large population of MMORPG players worldwide, even a small MMORPG addiction rate would imply enormous challenges to individuals and society. Indeed, the MMORPG population has increased steadily, and the top five MMORPGs in 2020 together account for 14.5 million players (Babalon, 2020). A multinational study finds that the rate of MMORPG addiction among sampled respondents ranges between 3.6% and 44.5% 1(Hussain et al., 2012). MMORPG addiction is a psychological state of maladaptive dependency on playing MMORPGs, which is “manifested through an obsessive pattern of IT-seeking and IT-use behaviours that take place at the expense of other important activities and infringe normal functioning” (Turel & Serenko, 2012 Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), which involve players customising their fictional in-game characters, interacting with other game players, and exploring never-ending immersive virtual worlds, are regarded as potentially addictive (Bacchini, De Angelis, & Fanara, 2017 Hsu, Wen, & Wu, 2009 You, Kim, & Lee, 2017). Recognising the severity of the problem of online gaming addiction, the World Health Organization included gaming disorder in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), and the American Psychiatric Association included Internet gaming disorder as a “condition requiring further study” in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DMS-5), signalling the potential dangers associated with online gaming. Furthermore, there is ample evidence of the negative consequences of online gaming addiction, such as reduced decision-making ability, interpersonal problems, mental and physical health problems and even death (Lee, 2013 Thomas, 2014 Ye, 2015). Recent market research demonstrates the prominence of gaming in the online entertainment industry, with 86% of Internet users reporting online gaming in the previous month (GlobalWebIndex, 2018). One possible reason for the increasing scholarly attention to online gaming addiction is that more individuals are spending time on online leisure activities every day. Most technology addiction studies have been conducted in the context of hedonic technologies, with social networking sites and online games being the most popular research foci (eg, Gong, Zhang, Cheung, Chen, & Lee, 2019 Hyun et al., 2015 Xu, Turel, & Yuan, 2012 Xue et al., 2018). In response to the call for information systems (IS) research on the dark side of technology use (Tarafdar, Gupta, & Turel, 2015), research on technology addiction has grown steadily in the IS discipline. Our study provides game developers and policymakers with insights into preventing MMORPG addiction to create an entertaining, healthy virtual playground. We offer an alternative perspective on the far-reaching, unintended relationships between technological affordances and addictive technology use. Our study contributes to the growing body of technology addiction literature by revealing the relationships between the two hedonic effects and the extent of MMORPG addiction, and by offering a contextualised explanation of the role of MMORPG affordances in these relationships. Furthermore, achievement and immersion affordances are positively associated with the duality of hedonic effects, whereas social affordance is not. The results show that both perceived positive mood enhancement and perceived negative mood reduction positively correlate with the extent of MMORPG addiction. Using structural equation modelling, we empirically test our research model with 406 MMORPG players. Building on the conceptual foundation of the hedonic management model of addiction and the technology affordance perspective, we develop a research model explaining how MMORPG affordances (ie, achievement, social and immersion affordances) are associated with the duality of hedonic effects (ie, perceived positive mood enhancement and perceived negative mood reduction) and the extent of MMORPG addiction. This article addresses this critical issue and fills research gaps by proposing and testing a research model of MMORPG addiction. Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) addiction presents a serious issue worldwide and has attracted increasing attention from academic and other public communities.
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