Creatability, achievability, and immersibility: New game design elements that increase online game usage

Online games are popular technology-enabled applications designed to satisfy a wide range of player needs. Self-determination theory (SDT) has been used in past online game studies to explain player satisfaction, but it is rarely used to examine game design as a trigger for player satisfaction, which reveals a research gap. This gap keeps game makers in the dark about the design of games that effectively satisfy players, throwing gamers’ ongoing game usage into doubt. Aiming to fill this gap, we proposed three new game design elements and examined their impacts on player satisfaction, continuance, and usage. We followed 546 participants who responded to our online survey and permitted us to collect their system-captured game usage data, generating two-wave and two-source data. We found that game achievability and game immersibility are game design elements that satisfy players. Competence satisfaction and autonomy satisfaction—but not relatedness satisfaction—are characteristics that secure players’ continuance and actual usage. Two replication studies were conducted to further verify these findings. Our study extends SDT backward to examine the game-contextualized triggers of satisfaction. These theorized triggers showcase game system design, theoretically clarifying the means of using SDT to design games, and providing practical insights to guide game makers in securing player continuance and actual usage.