Education Game Participants Behavior Intention Influence Factor Model And The Empirical Research

In recent years, educational games have drawn a great attention on industrial and academic field. People are highly concern on how they can motivate others to participate in educational games. Even though many research suggest that educational games can raise participants’ interest in learning and can help enhance the learning ability of participants, whether it can exert a favorable influence on the participants as expected largely depends on the their will. If the participants are not interested in educational games, they can hardly understand the educational intention hidden behind. In this situation, they often do not cooperate fully, and therefore the functions and meaning of this game are totally lost.Achieving the understanding of why participants are willing to join the game is actually one of the most challenging things to do in the researching area of educational games. So far, researchers have conducted many researches regarding the behavioral and psychological conditions of players who are playing online games for the purpose of entertainment, and it has been proved that flow experience, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use are the key influencing factors to players’ behavioral intention. However, there are rare researches concerning games that can both entertain and educate people. In addition, the majority of the researches focuses on factors like flow experience, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use but fail to analyze and discuss the fundamental causes of these factors.This research, based on the summary of the researches about players’ behavioral and psychological conditions, uses the theory of reasoned action, technology acceptance model, flow theory, Lewin dynamic field theory, need level theory, and self-determination theory to seek deeper factors that are responsible for the players’ behavioral intention. Also, this research attempts to put both players’ psychological needs and characteristics of educational games under the umbrella of the behavioral intention in order to systematically find out the factors that affect the players’ behavioral intention and its antecedent-cause-variables and also uncover all kinds of other factors that may, directly or indirectly, influence the players’ behavioral intention.This research concentrates on investigating a RPG educational game named Xueleba. It analyzes the intrinsic motivation (flow experience) and extrinsic motivation (perceived usefulness) of players from 9 to 12 years old. It is also aimed at discovering the relationship between these motivations and the behavioral intention of players. Further researches will focus on uncovering the influence of players’ psychological needs and characteristics of educational games on motivations and building the conceptual model. Using structural equation model, this paper will analyze data from 1222 elementary school students from fourth grade to sixth grade in order to substantiate the reasonability of the conceptual model. At the same time, a Flash educational game called Mingoville also utilized to double check the feasibility and expandability of the model. Then, the paper will discuss the structural variables in the conceptual model and systematically analyze the utility relationship among factors of the behavioral intention of players so as to accurately reflect the characteristics of behavior and psychology of players and provide strategies and suggestions for the practice of educational games in the future.The major outcomes of this research is that the behavioral intention of players is affected by factors ranging from their flow experience to perceived usefulness to perceived ease of use. What’s more, the flow experience is the most influential factor among these three. Players’ intrinsic motivation (flow experience) is affected by their psychological needs and the characteristics of game. Notice, players’ psychological needs play a more important role than the characteristics of game. Players’ extrinsic motivation (perceived usefulness) is dramatically affected by the perceived ease of use. However, there is no relation between players’ psychological needs and perceived usefulness. There is no big distinction in the results between the two chosen educational games. In addition, the one-way analysis of variance of the personal factors indicates that different gender difference does not have major effects on the behavioral intention of players, flow experience, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and psychological needs. On the contrary, factors like playing frequency, playing time, and playing experience affect all these results except the perceived ease of use.According to the outcomes reached by this research, we believe that the design of educational game products has to consider the following aspects like the players’flow experience,and the players’ psychological needs of relationship, competence and cognition in order to improve the behavioral intention of players from 9 to 12 years old. The conclusions give some suggestions for our government, schools and families.