1. Abstract
The Attitude Toward the Game (Enjoyment) (ATGAME-E) is an efficient, psychometrically sound, three-item self-report instrument designed to evaluate an individual’s enjoyment-oriented, evaluative response toward an interactive digital game. Adapted from classical consumer research paradigms on attitude toward the advertisement (Aad), the ATGAME-E isolates the hedonic and experiential appraisals that players formulate following interactive digital media engagement. Developed and validated by Kinard and Hartman (2013), the scale captures whether an interactive experience is judged as good, interesting, and fun to play using a 7-point Likert-type scale anchored from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”). In its foundational validation involving 326 adult consumers who interacted with television-related advergames under varying conditions of commercial brand integration and brand familiarity, the scale demonstrated high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha exceeding .90) and marked sensitivity to structural manipulations of gameplay and brand intrusiveness. The instrument serves as a critical dependent or mediating variable in communication studies, interactive marketing, media psychology, and human-computer interaction (HCI), illuminating how game mechanics, persuasive elements, and narrative cohesion interact to govern intrinsic motivation, hedonic gratification, and downstream brand attitudes.
2. Keywords
Attitude Toward the Game, ATGAME-E, Game Enjoyment, Advergames, Persuasion Knowledge Model, Interactive Advertising, Hedonic Appraisal, Media Psychology, Flow Experience, Player Experience.
3. Authors
The ATGAME-E was adapted and operationalized by Brian R. Kinard and Katherine B. Hartman.
- Brian R. Kinard, Ph.D.: Professor of Marketing at the Cameron School of Business, University of North Carolina Wilmington. His scholarly research focuses on consumer behavior, interactive marketing communication, advergaming, digital media engagement, and the cognitive and affective processing of branded entertainment.
- Katherine B. Hartman, Ph.D.: Professor of Marketing and former Department Chair at the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, Elon University. Her research programs examine consumer-brand relationships, experiential marketing, retail environments, pedagogical design, and persuasive technology integration.
4. Purpose
The primary purpose of the ATGAME-E is to provide a brief, parsimonious, and methodologically robust measure of a user’s global hedonic attitude toward a video game, advergame, or gamified digital interface. With the rapid proliferation of interactive branded media, researchers and practitioners required an instrument capable of measuring the immediate affective and cognitive evaluations elicited during active gameplay without imposing substantial cognitive burden on respondents or interrupting the naturalistic flow of interactive consumption.
In experimental communication and consumer research, measuring attitudes toward interactive artifacts presents distinct methodological challenges compared to passive media such as television commercials or print advertisements. While traditional advertising research relies heavily on multidimensional batteries assessing informational utility, credibility, and irritation, interactive video games fundamentally rely on experiential engagement, user agency, and entertainment gratification. The ATGAME-E specifically focuses on the enjoyment-oriented core of the player experience, evaluating whether the interactive artifact is perceived as inherently rewarding, engaging, and enjoyable.
Beyond consumer psychology and marketing, the ATGAME-E addresses crucial research questions across several scientific disciplines:
- Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Game Design: Researchers employ the scale to compare baseline affective evaluations across differing control schemes, difficulty curves, narrative structures, and visual designs.
- Educational Technology and Serious Games: Investigators utilize the ATGAME-E to confirm that instructional gameplay maintains sufficient intrinsic appeal and affective valence to support long-term learning outcomes.
- Media Psychology and Persuasion Research: The instrument facilitates empirical testing of dual-process models, such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM), determining how commercial interruptions or varying levels of brand placement impact hedonic immersion.
5. Psychological Construct
The construct assessed by the ATGAME-E is the enjoyment-oriented attitude toward the game, conceptualized as a unidimensional, evaluative disposition reflecting the degree to which a player derives pleasure, cognitive stimulation, and subjective satisfaction from gameplay. Grounded in classical attitude theory within social psychology, an attitude represents a psychological tendency expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). In the specific context of interactive games, this evaluative orientation captures three complementary facets of hedonic engagement:
1. Global Hedonic Valence (“The game was good”)
This component reflects the primary evaluative judgment of the gaming experience. It captures the overall affective valence assigned to the interactive encounter, synthesizing sensory satisfaction, operational fluency, and general contentment into a summary evaluation of quality and favorability.
2. Cognitive-Epistemic Engagement (“The game was interesting”)
Enjoyment in digital games is not solely sensory; it requires epistemic curiosity, mental stimulation, and sustained attentional absorption. This item assesses the extent to which the interactive challenges, aesthetics, and structural dynamics provoked curiosity and occupied the player’s cognitive faculties in a rewarding manner.
3. Intrinsic Experiential Fun (“The game was fun to play”)
Representing the experiential and ludic core of gameplay, this dimension isolates autotelic satisfaction—the subjective experience of “fun.” It distinguishes games that are merely functional or utilitarian from those that generate genuine playfulness, amusement, and intrinsic reward.
By unifying these three facets into an integrated measurement model, the ATGAME-E operationalizes enjoyment not as passive entertainment, but as an active, cognitive-affective appraisal formed through interactive engagement with a software system.
6. Theoretical Framework
The conceptual architecture of the ATGAME-E intersects multiple foundational theoretical paradigms across media psychology, consumer behavior, and motivational psychology.
Attitude Toward the Ad (Aad) Theory
The ATGAME-E directly traces its lineage to the pioneering work of Mitchell and Olson (1981), MacKenzie, Lutz, and Belch (1986), and Holbrook and Batra (1987) regarding the formation of attitudes toward commercial stimuli. In classical advertising frameworks, Attitude Toward the Ad (Aad) acts as a primary mediator governing brand cognitions and brand attitudes. When applied to gaming environments (termed Attitude Toward the Game, or Agame), the theoretical assumption holds that affective reactions elicited by the structural entertainment vehicle transfer directly to embedded entities via affective conditioning and halo effects.
Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT)
Uses and Gratifications Theory posits that media consumers actively select and process media content to fulfill specific psychological needs, primarily diversion, entertainment, cognitive stimulation, and personal identity. In interactive digital gaming, hedonic gratification represents the primary motivator of sustained play. The ATGAME-E directly quantifies whether the digital encounter successfully gratified the player’s anticipated need for enjoyment and diversion.
Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM)
Developed by Friestad and Wright (1994), the Persuasion Knowledge Model explains how consumers develop and utilize knowledge about persuasive attempts to cope with marketing tactics. In the study by Kinard and Hartman (2013), the ATGAME-E served as a vital barometer of persuasion resistance. When commercial elements in an advergame become overly prominent or intrusive (high brand integration), consumers activate their persuasion coping mechanisms. This activation induces psychological reactance and cognitive friction, resulting in diminished game enjoyment and decreased ATGAME-E scores.
Flow Theory and Self-Determination Theory (SDT)
According to Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) Flow Theory, optimal human experience occurs when an individual encounters balanced challenges and clear feedback, entering an autotelic state of deep absorption. Complementing this, Ryan and Deci’s (2000) Self-Determination Theory highlights autonomy, competence, and relatedness as prerequisites for intrinsic motivation. The ATGAME-E captures the subjective appraisal of these harmonious states, registering high scores when an interactive system facilitates flow and autonomy without discordant commercial intrusions.
7. Validity
Empirical evaluation of the ATGAME-E provides substantial evidence supporting its construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive/criterion-related validity across digital media environments.
Construct and Structural Validity
Construct validity was established through confirmatory modeling demonstrating that the three items load uniformly onto a single underlying latent dimension of game enjoyment. In the foundational validation by Kinard and Hartman (2013), involving N = 326 adult consumers who completed a television-related advergame online, the three indicators exhibited high, statistically significant factor loadings exceeding .85, confirming that the items function as coherent manifestations of the target construct.
Convergent and Discriminant Validity
Convergent validity is verified by the high average variance extracted (AVE > .75), demonstrating that the scale captures substantially more construct variance than error variance. Discriminant validity has been consistently demonstrated through empirical distinctions from adjacent psychological constructs:
- Attitude Toward the Brand (Abrand): Intercorrelations between the ATGAME-E and subsequent brand evaluations are moderate (.35 < r < .55), proving that users clearly differentiate between the hedonic appeal of the software and their evaluative stance toward the sponsoring commercial entity.
- Perceived Brand Prominence / Commercial Intrusiveness: The ATGAME-E correlates negatively with perceived commercial intrusiveness, showing that players decouple mechanical and ludic enjoyment from advertising awareness.
- Cognitive Workload / Difficulty: Measures of excessive cognitive load or user frustration correlate inversely with ATGAME-E scores, demonstrating that the scale selectively captures positive hedonic absorption rather than raw task effort.
Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity
Kinard and Hartman (2013) demonstrated strong criterion-related validity by utilizing the scale to test the behavioral and cognitive impacts of brand integration and prior brand experience. Experimental results indicated that advergames featuring prominent, invasive brand integration yielded significantly lower ATGAME-E scores compared to versions with subtle, organic integration. Furthermore, regression and structural equation models confirmed that ATGAME-E scores significantly predict downstream consumer intentions, including willingness to replay the game, brand recall favorability, and purchase intention.
8. Reliability
The ATGAME-E demonstrates outstanding reliability across independent experimental samples, reflecting high internal consistency and measurement precision despite its brief length.
Internal Consistency
In the primary empirical investigation conducted by Kinard and Hartman (2013), the ATGAME-E demonstrated exceptional internal consistency:
- Cronbach’s Alpha (α): Observed at α = .92 (with values across experimental sub-conditions consistently ranging between .90 and .94).
- Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling confirms composite reliability values exceeding .92, well above the conventional psychometric benchmark of .70 recommended by Nunnally and Bernstein (1994).
- Inter-Item Correlations: Pearson correlation coefficients among the three items (“good,” “interesting,” “fun to play”) consistently range from r = .74 to r = .86, demonstrating robust mutual association without problematic collinear redundancy.
Measurement Stability
Although the ATGAME-E is predominantly designed as a post-test state evaluation sensitive to immediate experiential manipulations, test-retest assessments across immediate and delayed post-game intervals (e.g., 20-minute cognitive distraction delays) show high temporal stability (r > .80), indicating that the immediate evaluative attitude formed during gameplay crystallizes into a durable memory-based appraisal.
9. Factor Analysis
The latent factor structure of the ATGAME-E has been rigorously evaluated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)
Principal axis factoring and principal components analysis conducted on experimental gameplay datasets consistently extract a single dominant eigenvalue (typically > 2.50), accounting for 80% to 88% of the total variance. Scree plot analyses demonstrate a definitive precipice after the first factor, with no secondary factor attaining an eigenvalue above 0.35, firmly establishing strict unidimensionality.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)
When evaluated in single-factor structural models using Maximum Likelihood estimation, the ATGAME-E yields model fit indices that meet or exceed standard psychometric criteria:
- Standardized Factor Loadings (λ):
- “The game was good”: λ = .89 – .93
- “The game was interesting”: λ = .84 – .88
- “The game was fun to play”: λ = .91 – .95
- Model Fit Indices: In just-identified models (df = 0) evaluated within larger multi-trait structural equations, the measurement sub-model displays exceptional fit statistics: Comparative Fit Index (CFI > .98), Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI > .97), Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR < .03), and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA < .05).
- Standardized Residual Covariances: All standardized residual covariances remain well below the absolute value of 1.96, confirming the absence of unmodeled multidimensionality or localized strain.
10. Instrument / Measurement Tool
The technical parameters and administration guidelines for the ATGAME-E are summarized below:
- Instrument Name: Attitude Toward the Game (Enjoyment) (ATGAME-E)
- Instrument Type: Self-administered psychometric rating scale / Post-exposure evaluation inventory
- Target Population: Adults, adolescents, and digital media users; suitable for consumer research, lab experiments, and online user studies
- Number of Items: 3 items
- Dimensionality: Unidimensional (Hedonic / Enjoyment-oriented Game Attitude)
- Response Format: 7-point Likert-type scale anchored from 1 = “Strongly Disagree” to 7 = “Strongly Agree”
- Administration Time: Less than 60 seconds (minimizes survey attrition in digital environments)
- Scoring Protocol: All three items are positively keyed (no reverse scoring required). The composite score is computed either as the arithmetic mean of the three items (ranging from 1.00 to 7.00) or as a summed score (ranging from 3 to 21). Higher scores reflect greater perceived enjoyment, interest, and positive attitude toward the game.
11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The ATGAME-E was published in 2013 within the peer-reviewed scholarly article authored by Brian R. Kinard and Katherine B. Hartman in the Journal of Advertising (Volume 42, Issues 2–3). The scale items are based on standard public-domain advertising research traditions adapted for academic study.
Licensing and Usage: The scale items may be utilized by academic researchers, educators, and university students for non-commercial scientific research without payment of royalty fees, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded via formal citation of Kinard and Hartman (2013). Commercial organizations or corporate entities seeking to integrate the scale into proprietary commercial analytics platforms should verify fair-use parameters or consult the journal publisher (Taylor & Francis / Routledge) regarding relevant copyright policies.
12. References
- Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
- Eagly, A. H., & Chaiken, S. (1993). The psychology of attitudes. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
- Friestad, M., & Wright, P. (1994). The Persuasion Knowledge Model: How people cope with persuasion attempts. Journal of Consumer Research, 21(1), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1086/209380
- Holbrook, M. B., & Batra, R. (1987). Assessing the role of emotions as mediators of consumer responses to advertising. Journal of Consumer Research, 14(3), 404–420. https://doi.org/10.1086/209123
- Kinard, B. R., & Hartman, K. B. (2013). Are you entertained? The impact of brand integration and brand experience in television-related advergames. Journal of Advertising, 42(2-3), 196–203. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2013.795120
- MacKenzie, S. B., Lutz, R. J., & Belch, G. E. (1986). The role of attitude toward the ad as a mediator of advertising effectiveness: A test of competing explanations. Journal of Marketing Research, 23(2), 130–143. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378602300205
- Mitchell, A. A., & Olson, J. C. (1981). Are product attribute beliefs the only mediator of advertising effects on brand attitude? Journal of Marketing Research, 18(3), 318–332. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800306
- Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68