A Mixed-Methods Approach to Explore Users’ Behavior in Playing Mobile Games

A Mixed-Methods Approach to Explore Users’ Behavior in Playing Mobile Games

With the rapid growth and popularization of mobile phones, the use of mobile applications (Apps) is booming. According to the Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute indicated that mobile games have become an important leisure for people. The immediate goals of the study were threefold: First, this study presented a framework and attempted to acquire an in-depth understanding of the decision-making process with regard to play or not play massive multiplayer on-line role-playing games (MMORPGs) on mobile. Second, this study strove to build up a better model using an ethnographic decision tree modeling (EDTM) that introduced the decision-making process of mobile players. Finally, in practice, marketers and mobile game manufactures could easily become aware of the players’ considerations and exactly recognizing what needs to be done to satisfy their demands. This study proposed a decision tree model which was built through 13 criteria where qualitative data gathered from in-depth interviews of 30 respondents. Then, the decision tree model was tested using qualitative and quantitative data from interviews and structured questionnaires involving the 153 respondents in model verification phase and predictive rate of the decision tree model was 85.62%.