Online Virtual Experience, Leisure Involvement On Customer Behavioral Intentions

With the continuous improvement of global information infrastructure and the rapid development of Internet technology, people's lives have been integrated gradually with the influx of information, networking and virtualization. Some network leisure way have gradually substituted for the traditional entertainment way, Online Games is such a best case. Now our country's game industry has entered a transition. Casual games will soon enter competitive phase of MMORPG. The studying of behavioral intentions is so important that the operators supposed to know how to take effective strategies to maintain existing customers and attract more new customers.Pine and Gilmore(1998) pointed out:Twenty-one century has been entered to experienced economy era; therefore, an arena of war for marketing will be focused to set up a consumption experience in the future. Based on the "Experience Model" which take entertainment, esthetic, education and escape as the four sources of experience addressed by Pine and Gilmore(1998), this study quotes the concept of experience in the casual games. Besides, the casual games is an environment that can provide people social contact and interact with each other. People can enjoy an interactive experience by involving in virtual community. So this study adds "interaction" as the fifth aspect of experience and attempts to find out the experience qualities of casual games which attain to the leisure involvement and enhance behavior intention.In this paper, first we develops a conceptual model and related hypothesizes based on the literature review. Second, we choose the sample for survey from current player of Teng Xun QQ casual games to obtain a total of 311 valid questionnaires. Third, we use SPSS 16.0 for reliability and validity analysis, correlated and regressive analysis to tests the model. The major finding are:The experience of casual games consists of five dimensions:entertainment, esthetic, education and escape and interaction which remarkably influenced on the leisure involvement and behavior intention in common. However, the influence exerted is not equally distributed among all the dimensions. Leisure involvement exerts remarkable influence on behavior intention. If consumers have a good leisure involvement, their behavior intention will be higher. Besides, experience will be affected by intermediary of leisure involvement, and then influenced behavior intention. According to the above results:If operators want to meet users'leisure involvement and boost the revisiting rate in the future, they must provide overall experiences for users. Finally, these activities will make websites more popular, bring higher profit for operation.