Many of the above approaches employ multiple factors to account for the differences between players’ engagements in videogame play From Choi el al with Cognitive and Perceptive fun to Ermi and Mäyrä’s list of possible powers. Is it possible to perform some kind of meta-analysis on these many factors in order to merge these various theories into a kind of principle of game-play and videogame engagement? Can we utilise these theories to understand what is going on when individual X plays game G, or can we use these to predict how a that player might engage
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with new game H? My personal impression is that such an application of such factor based theories would be quite difficult without some guiding principle, or fundamental hypothesis related to how these factors are resolved in any particular experience. For example, what is the relationship
between Malone’s Challenge, Curiosity, and Fantasy that has John play Ultimate Imagination Force XII all day whereas Jane can barely manage 5 minutes before switching to something else? Are these factors properties of the game or the player? Is Malone’s observation that the gender of the individual effects the kind of features sought a demonstration that individual differences are key to understanding engagement? Are these factors then subjective assessments of an experience rather than objective properties of games? Are there other indicators of individual difference which have a bearing on videogame engagement, other than gender? Is there a causal relationship to be found in any of this?
Theories with possible broad, and potentially causal, applicability are those such as Carr’s impression that past experiences shape taste and thus preference and engagement, and Ermi and Mäyrä’s observation that their subjects seemed to be seeking “empowerment or imaginative liberation”, but without unpacking how these are resolved, and precisely what influence these effects might have on an individual’s behaviour there is still work to do to obtain a unifying hypothesis about just what it is that has one player engage with a particular game and others not.
From the empirically derived or tested theories encountered above we can see that they are often bound to observations about specific types of games, or limit their studies to certain demographic groups and are thus restricted in their scope for explaining game play in a broadly applicable sense and instead focus on subsets of games or narrow sets of players. As such we are still looking for an empirically derived or validated theory or model of videogame play that accounts for males and females, young and old,
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games, adventure games, and games that haven't been devised yet, at home with friends, at home alone, on the bus, at work, in the arcade, at school, in the games shop, or anywhere else games might exist. Perhaps there is no commonality between all these conditions. Perhaps any conclusion, be it a broad concept or a multivariate model, would be so general as to be useless in understanding the specifics of videogame play, such a theory necessarily being at a level of universal human subjectivity instead of at a granular level of recognisable videogame or features of a game play experience. So how would one set out to find such an answer? How would one find out what videogame play is or what the fundamental features of videogame engagement (and thus disengagement) are? Do we poll theories from other fields and domains and modify them to relate to videogame play? Do we select from these theories analytically and validate seemingly 'best' candidate theories empirically? Do we forego the idea of a set of factors or hypotheses as a useful answer and focus on case studies to suggest a series of narratives from which we can draw multiple conclusions at multiple levels of
abstraction? Do we start from the beginning and extensively examine the domain to determine where to look, what to look at, and eventually zero in on what is important? Ultimately the approach taken will depend on the type of answer we are looking for, and I feel that a most interesting product, at this stage of development in the field, would be a broad hypothesis with a degree of explanatory and predictive power (a principal dependant variable). So an answer of the form “players play games because X” and by extension “Player A plays game J because of an instantiation of X”, is the ideal sought. Of the reviewed research the theory which seems closest to this form is that of Carr (2005), who suggested that an individual's taste is experientially and socially derived (though we cannot be certain that this is not an observation exclusive to teenage girls active in a games club); so players play games that they have experienced elements of before or have received positive feedback about from their social context. An example Carr
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presents is where some girls came to play a certain game when they saw others playing it and thus experienced it in the agreeable social setting of the games club, but had expressed no interest in doing so until they had that experience.
This level of answer seems most appropriate as a first step. From this point we can look for exceptions in the domain and relationships with other theory and quickly see where we should adjust our thinking. Taking Carr's example we could suggest that her theory might have poor predictive power as it seems obvious that any access to and thus exposure to a game is not necessarily going to result in a degree of positive
engagement, and it is difficult to see how any engagement might occur without exposure or recommendation, though we can't dismiss the hypothesis out of hand, we would just need to potentially look for conditions and features of this behaviour, and modify the theory accordingly.
In summary then, there are no empirically derived or validated theories which yield hypotheses at the level of operation which is of most interest to us at this time. That is are there universal factors or principles which can help us predict why any prospective player might engage with any game at any particular time.