years) playing WoW. In other words, WoW players with higher confidence in their abilities are more likely to invest in playtime. More broadly, this suggests that higher self-efficacy is associated with longer player commitment.
Why is self-efficacy so manifest to a player’ s commitment to WoW?
Some of the answers lie in the game genre itself. WoW is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game( MMORPG). MMORPGs are a subgenre of role-playing games where the player typically creates a customizable avatar that can explore a vast persistent state that evolves, even when not interacting with the game [ 13 ]. A key feature of MMORPGs is that they typically exist around large communities of hundreds to millions of players, allowing the players to interact with each other in different ways [ 13 ]. Because of this, MMORPG new game states rely on having a strong community of dedicated players to weave the world state.
In surveying WoW players, self-efficacy is understood as a state [ 14 ]. And in distinguishing it this way, specific self-efficacy( self-efficacy related to a defined context, i. e. playing WoW) is expressed as a motivational state that is less resistant to short-term changes [ 14 ].