Indagator: Investigating perceived gratifications of an application that blends mobile content sharing with gameplay

Abstract

The confluence of mobile content sharing and pervasive gaming yields new opportunities for developing novel applications on mobile devices. Yet, studies on users" attitudes and behaviors related to mobile gaming, content sharing and retrieval activities (referred simply as content sharing and gaming) have been lacking. For this reason, the objectives of this paper are three-fold. One, it introduces Indagator, an application which incorporates multiplayer, pervasive gaming elements into mobile content sharing activities. Two, it seeks to uncover the motivations for content sharing within a game-based environment. Three, it aims to identify types of users who are motivated to use Indagator for content sharing. Informed by the uses and gratifications paradigm, a survey was designed and administered to 203 undergraduate and graduate students from two large universities.The findings revealed that perceived gratification factors such as information discovery, entertainment, information quality, socialization, and relationship maintenance, and demographic variables such basic familiarity with features of mobile communication devices, and IT-related backgrounds were significant in predicting intention to use mobile sharing and gaming applications such as Indagator. However, age, gender, and the personal status gratification factor were nonsignificant predictors. This paper concludes by presenting the implications, limitations and future research directions.

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