This study examined the motivation of young people in internet gaming using the dualistic model of passion. Path analysis was used to examine the relationships between the two types of passion: obsessive and harmonious passion, behavioral regulations, and flow. A total of 1074 male secondary school students from Singapore took part in the study. The results of the path analysis showed that external, introjected, and identified regulations positively predicted obsessive passion, while harmonious passion was predicted by identified and intrinsic regulations. Flow in digital gaming was predicted directly by harmonious passion, as well as indirectly through intrinsic regulation. This study supports the proposed dualistic model of passion in explaining young people’s motivation in internet gaming.
Digital gaming has become immensely popular in recent years. Although players of online games come from all demographic groups and ages, Yee’s (2006) online survey of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) players revealed that a significant proportion of gamers (25% in his sample of over 30,000 gamers) all over the world are young people in their teens. In fact, some of the teenagers are spending more time playing games in cyber cafes than in schools or on school-related activities (Lo, Wang, & Fang, 2005). Clearly, the gaming environments have tremendous appeal and young people are highly motivated to engage in them. It is thus not surprising that a number of papers have been written on gamers’ behavior and their motivation (e.g., Bartle, 1996, Ryan et al., 2006, Wan and Chiou, 2006, Wang et al., 2008 and Yee, 2006). Nonetheless, a lot more can be done to help us understand the underlying psychological processes involved in teenage gamers’ motivation, especially in terms of their passion and flow experience.
Vallerand and his colleagues (2003) proposed a dualistic model of passion that can help us understand players’ motivation in digital gaming. In their conceptual framework, passion is defined as “a strong inclination towards an activity that one finds important, invests time in, and likes” (Vallerand et al., 2003, p. 757). One important characteristic of passion is that the activity can be so ‘self-defining’ that it becomes part of or internalized into the person’s identity. For example, those who are passionate about playing basketball do not merely play the game; they are ‘basketballers’. Likewise, those who have a passion for gaming do not just game; they call themselves ‘gamers’ or the names of their avatars (game characters) in the real world.
According to the dualistic model, there are two types of passion have been identified. Harmonious passion (HP) refers to the pursuit or engagement in an activity by choice and is in harmony with other activities in different domains. The internalization is autonomous or more self-determined. This type of passion is linked to positive outcomes during and after activity engagement. In comparison, obsessive passion (OP) is characterized as an internal pressure that forces a person to engage in his or her passionate activity and leads to conflicts with activities in other life domains. This results in a more controlled internalization of the activity into one’s identity. This form of passion is linked to negative outcomes during and after activity engagement.
The processes of internalization stem from the self-determina
