A Study on the Various Attribute of E-Sport Influencing Flow and Identification

• Published in: Journal of global scholars of marketing science pp. 59 - 80
• Main Authors: 서문식, 안진우, 김은영, 엄성원
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Korean
• Published: 한국마케팅과학회 01.03.2008
• Subjects: 경영학
• ISSN: 2163-9159; 2163-9167

Recently, e-sports are growing with potentiality as a new industry with conspicuous profit model. But studies that dealing with e-sports are not enough. Hence, proposes of this paper are both to establish basic model that is for the design of e-sport marketing strategy and to contribute toward future studies which are related to e-sports. Recently, the researches to explain sports-sponsorship through the identification theory have been discovered. Many researches say that somewhat proper identification is a requirement for most sponsors to improve the their images which is essential to sponsorship activity. Consequently, the research for sponsorship associated with identification in the e-sports, not in the physical sports is the core sector of this study. We extracted the variables from online's major characteristics and existing sport sponsorship researches. First, because e-sports mean the tournaments or leagues in the use of online game, the main event of the game is likely to call it online game. Online media's attributes are distinguished from those of offline. Especially, interactivity, anonymity, and expandibility as a e-sport game attributes are able to be mentioned. So, these inherent online attributes are examined on the relationship with flow. Second, in physical sports games, Fisher(1998) revealed that team similarity and team attractivity were positively related to team identification. Wann(1996) said that the result of former game influenced the evaluation of the next game, then in turn has an effect on the identification of team supporters. Considering these results in the e-sports side, e-sports gamer' attractivity, similarity, and match result seem to be important precedent variables of the identification with a gamer. So, these e-sport gamer attributes are examined on the relationship with both flow and identification with a gamer. Csikszentmihalyi(1988) defined the term flow as feeling status for him to be making current positive experience optimally. Hoffman and Novak(1996) also said that if a user experienced the flow he would visit a website without any reward. Therefore flow might be positively associated with user's identification with a gamer. And, Swanson(2003) disclosed that team identification influenced the positive results of sponsorship, which included attitude toward sponsors, sponsor patronage, and satisfaction with sponsors. That is, identification with a gamer expect to be connected with corporation identification significantly. According to the above, we can design the following research model. Interactivity Anonymity Expandibility Similarity Attractivity Match Result Gamer Identification Flow Sponsor Identification e-sport game's attributes e-sport gamer's attributes All variables used in this study(interactivity, anonymity, expandibility, attractivity, similarity, match result, flow, identification with a gamer, and identification with a sponsor) definitely were defined operationally underlying precedent researches. Sample collection was carried out to the person who has an experience to have enjoyed e-sports during June 2006. Much portion of samples is men because much more men than women enjoy e-sports in general. Two-step approach was used to test the hypotheses. First, confirmatory factor analysis was committed to guarantee the validity and reliability of variables. The results showed that all variables had not only intensive and discriminant validity, but also reliability. Then, research model was examined with fully structural equation using LISREL 8.3 version. The fitness of the suggested model mostly was at the acceptable level. Shortly speaking about the results, first of all, in e-sports game attributes, only interactivity which is called a basic feature in online situation affected flow positively. Secondly, in e-sports gamer's attributes, similarity with a gamer and match result influenced flow positively, but there ... KCI Citation Count: 5