Leveraging online gaming communities to increase game use

Game developers who aim to retain players and increase their game use need to know how players’ in-game cooperation knowledge and community norm compliance can be leveraged to encourage players’ information processing, revealing a research gap. To address this gap, we used social categorization theory (SCT) to construct a model to answer the following research question: How do community triggers form community image advocacy and thereby increase game use? We collected two waves of data. The first contained responses from 3530 players. A follow-up of these initial players resulted in 1202 complete responses to both waves. Structural equation modeling was employed to test the hypotheses. It was determined that both in-game cooperation knowledge and compliance with gaming community norms significantly affect players’ community image advocacy (ß ranging from.06 to.40, p < .05), which increases their game use (ß=.13, p < .05). Theoretically, these findings contribute to advancing the understanding of SCT by providing novel community triggers that activate community image advocacy and thus fuel repeated action. Our study offers pioneering insights for game developers, showing that they can leverage gaming communities by encouraging players’ norm compliance behavior and facilitating the accumulation of players’ in-game cooperation knowledge. The community-leveraged information–communication process provides a novel means to increase players’ game use.