Attitude Toward the Game Scale (ATGAME)

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward the Game Scale (ATGAME) is a six-item psychometric instrument designed to evaluate an individual’s overall affective and evaluative disposition toward a specific video game or interactive digital experience. Developed and validated by Monika K. J. Waiguny, Michelle R. Nelson, and Bo Marko (2013), the instrument was originally introduced to assess how the thematic content of an advergame—specifically the presence or absence of violent elements—influences consumer perceptions and subsequently transfers valence to embedded brand representations via evaluative conditioning. Structured as a 7-point semantic differential scale, the ATGAME measures core dimensions of subjective user experience across six bipolar adjective pairs: appeal, pleasantness, dynamism, attractiveness, entertainment value, and utilitarian benefit. Psychometric analyses demonstrate that the scale functions as a robust unidimensional measure characterized by high internal consistency (Cronbach’s $\alpha ge .88$), sound convergent validity with measures of brand evaluation and game enjoyment, and discriminant validity against constructs such as gameplay difficulty and pre-existing brand loyalty. Beyond its foundational application in consumer psychology and digital marketing, the ATGAME serves as a versatile evaluative tool in media psychology, human-computer interaction (HCI), serious game design, and digital entertainment studies.

2. Keywords

Attitude Toward the Game Scale, ATGAME, advergames, evaluative conditioning, semantic differential, affective spillover, advertising psychology, media psychology, player experience, psychometrics, brand attitude, video game evaluation.

3. Authors

The scale was developed and operationalized by:

• Monika K. J. Waiguny — Institute of Media and Communications Management, School of Management, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland (subsequently at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria). Research specialization: Children’s consumer behavior, persuasion in interactive media, digital marketing, and advergame mechanics.
• Michelle R. Nelson — Department of Advertising, Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA. Research specialization: Persuasion knowledge, consumer literacy, consumer culture, and non-traditional promotional formats.
• Bo Marko — Research contributor collaborating on experimental design and psychometric evaluation of interactive advertising environments.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward the Game Scale (ATGAME) is to capture a player’s global evaluative response toward an interactive video game. In modern digital communication, video games are no longer merely recreational software; they represent sophisticated communication channels, educational platforms, and promotional environments. When brands embed products or thematic messaging within games—a practice known as advergaming—the holistic experience of the gameplay serves as an affective vehicle. The ATGAME addresses the critical methodological need for a concise, psychometrically sound, and easily administered self-report tool capable of quantifying the valence and intensity of the user’s affective disposition immediately following game exposure.

In applied research, the ATGAME is widely used to investigate the mechanisms of affective transfer and evaluative conditioning. According to the foundational premise established by Waiguny, Nelson, and Marko (2013), an individual’s evaluation of an advergame serves as a mediating variable between gameplay mechanics (such as violent versus non-violent content) and subsequent evaluations of embedded commercial entities. If a player finds a game unappealing, stressful, or excessively aggressive, negative affective responses can contaminate the embedded brand. Conversely, a highly entertaining, dynamic, and pleasant game experience fosters positive evaluative spillover, enhancing explicit and implicit brand attitudes.

Beyond commercial advertising, the ATGAME has utility in educational gaming (serious games), health intervention software, and user interface assessments. In clinical and educational research, assessing user disposition toward a digital intervention is critical for understanding compliance, engagement, and attrition rates. If participants hold a negative attitude toward a gamified therapeutic task, the intervention’s efficacy is inevitably compromised. Hence, the ATGAME provides researchers with a rapid diagnostic metric to determine whether the motivational and experiential architecture of a game succeeds in engaging its target audience.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the ATGAME is the attitude toward the game ($A_{game}$), defined as a learned predisposition to respond in a consistently favorable or unfavorable manner with respect to a specific gaming artifact. This construct is theoretically derived from the broader construct of Attitude Toward the Ad ($A_{ad}$), established in seminal consumer psychology literature by researchers such as MacKenzie, Lutz, and Belch (1986). However, $A_{game}$ incorporates experiential, participatory, and agency-driven components that distinguish interactive gameplay from passive media reception.

The scale captures this overarching attitude across six interrelated evaluative facets:

• Aesthetic Appeal (Unappealing – Appealing): Reflects the respondent’s primary sensory and visual appraisal of the game’s interface, audiovisual fidelity, and thematic design. High aesthetic appeal elicits positive initial orientation and sustained visual attention.
• Hedonic Valence (Unpleasant – Pleasant): Represents the core affective tone generated during play. Rooted in Russell’s circumplex model of affect, pleasantness captures whether the interactive session induced positive hedonic feelings versus frustration, stress, or aversion.
• Perceived Dynamism (Boring – Dynamic): Assesses the pacing, action density, and kinetic quality of the gameplay. Dynamism corresponds to the arousal dimension of emotional experience, discriminating between under-stimulating (boring) and engagingly active digital environments.
• Visual and Thematic Attractiveness (Attractive – Unattractive): Evaluates the cohesive aesthetic beauty and stylistic charm of the game world. This facet examines how inviting and aesthetically compelling the game environment appears to the user.
• Entertainment Value (Not entertaining – Entertaining): Quantifies the intrinsic enjoyment, playfulness, and amusement derived from the game mechanics. Entertainment represents the quintessential driver of digital play, indexing the degree to which the experience fulfilled the user’s recreational goals.
• Functional/Cognitive Benefit (Not beneficial – Beneficial): Captures the utilitarian dimension of the evaluation. Even in recreational settings, players evaluate whether an experience was worthwhile, informative, mentally stimulating, or skill-enhancing.

6. Theoretical Framework

The ATGAME is anchored in several prominent theories in media psychology, social cognition, and psychometrics:

Evaluative Conditioning and Affect Transfer

The theoretical cornerstone of the ATGAME’s original application is Evaluative Conditioning (EC). EC stipulates that an attitude toward a previously neutral conditioned stimulus (CS; e.g., an unfamiliar or established brand) changes following repeated pairing with a valenced unconditioned stimulus (US; e.g., the gameplay environment). In an advergame, the game serves as the primary affective context (the US). The attitude toward the game ($A_{game}$) quantifies the valence and intensity of the unconditioned affective response. Waiguny et al. (2013) demonstrated that when games feature violent interactions, the negative affective states elicited by aggression suppress $A_{game}$, which in turn prevents or degrades positive evaluative conditioning of the associated brand.

Dual-Process Models of Persuasion

The instrument draws on dual-process models such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). In interactive video games, cognitive resources are heavily taxed by the physical and mental demands of gameplay—navigating obstacles, tracking targets, and making real-time decisions. As articulated by Lang’s (2000) Limited Capacity Model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing (LC4MP), high cognitive load leaves limited capacity for central-route, analytical processing of secondary messages (e.g., brand logos). Under these conditions, persuasion operates primarily via peripheral routes. The global, holistic attitude measured by the ATGAME serves as a salient peripheral cue: players transfer their generalized affective appraisal directly to the contextually associated entities without extensive cognitive deliberation.

Osgood’s Dimensional Theory of Meaning

Methodologically, the ATGAME is grounded in the classic psychometric work of Charles E. Osgood and colleagues (1957) on the measurement of meaning. Osgood established that human semantic judgments fall into three primary affective dimensions: Evaluation (good-bad, pleasant-unpleasant), Potency (strong-weak), and Activity (fast-slow, dynamic-static). The ATGAME emphasizes the Evaluation dimension while incorporating items that tap into perceived Activity (e.g., Dynamic) and functional reward (e.g., Beneficial), synthesizing them into a cohesive assessment of subjective artifact value.

7. Validity

The ATGAME demonstrates robust psychometric validity across experimental and empirical investigations in marketing and media research.

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the scale’s capacity to operationalize global game evaluation as a distinct, unitary affective construct. In empirical factor analyses, the six semantic differential items consistently load onto a single dominant factor accounting for more than 60% to 75% of the total variance. The absence of multi-factorial fragmentation confirms that user appraisals of interactive gameplay coalesce into an integrated evaluative gestalt.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Convergent validity is confirmed through significant positive correlations with conceptually adjacent constructs. Research utilizing the ATGAME demonstrates strong, statistically significant correlations with:

• Game Enjoyment: Measured via self-determination theory subscales (such as the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory), where $r$ typically ranges from $.65$ to $.80$ ($p < .001$).
• Attitude Toward the Brand ($A_{brand}$): Significant positive correlations ($r \approx .45$ to $.60$) in non-violent advergame conditions, confirming the hypothesized affective transfer mechanism.
• Flow Experience: Moderate to high correlations with dimensions of immersion and telepresence during gameplay ($r \approx .40$ to $.55$).

Discriminant validity has been substantiated by comparing ATGAME scores against unrelated or distinct operational variables. The scale does not unduly correlate with perceived task difficulty, controller frustration, or baseline brand familiarity prior to exposure ($r < .20$), indicating that the ATGAME selectively measures affective evaluation of the interactive artifact rather than peripheral technical barriers or pre-existing cognitive schemas.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

Waiguny, Nelson, and Marko (2013) established strong predictive validity by showing that ATGAME scores predicted both explicit brand attitudes and implicit brand associations measured via reaction-time tasks (such as the Implicit Association Test). Furthermore, the scale reliably discriminates between different structural game designs: participants exposed to violent versions of an advergame reported significantly lower ATGAME scores ($F(1, 148) = 12.43, p < .001$) compared to participants exposed to non-violent, cooperative gameplay formats.

8. Reliability

The ATGAME exhibits high internal consistency across diverse empirical samples, ranging from children and adolescents to adult consumer panels.

Internal Consistency Metrics

• Cronbach’s Alpha ($\alpha$): In the seminal validation study by Waiguny et al. (2013), the six-item scale yielded an overall Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .89$, well above the conventional .70 threshold for research instruments and approaching the .90 benchmark recommended for clinical-grade reliability. Subsequent replications in digital media and advergame research have reported alpha coefficients consistently between $.86$ and $.93$.
• Composite Reliability (CR) and McDonald’s Omega ($\omega$): When evaluated under structural equation modeling (SEM) frameworks, the scale achieves composite reliability coefficients exceeding $.88$, demonstrating that the high reliability is not merely an artifact of tau-equivalence assumptions inherent to Cronbach’s alpha.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): The AVE values reported for the construct consistently exceed $.55$ (typically ranging from $.58$ to $.68$), demonstrating that the scale captures substantially more construct-relevant variance than measurement error.

Test-Retest Stability

Because the ATGAME measures an evaluative state formed in response to an immediate interactive stimulus, long-term test-retest reliability is influenced by memory decay and repeated-exposure effects. However, short-term test-retest examinations (conducted within 24 to 48 hours without intermediate gameplay) show substantial stability coefficients ($r_{tt} = .78$ to $.84$), indicating that the scale reliably captures stable post-consumption impressions rather than ephemeral, second-by-second emotional fluctuations.

9. Factor Analysis

Extensive psychometric evaluations utilizing both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) confirm the unidimensional architecture of the ATGAME.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial factor extractions using Principal Axis Factoring and Maximum Likelihood extraction with Promax rotation uniformly yield a single-factor solution based on Kaiser’s criterion (eigenvalue $> 1.0$) and Cattell’s scree plot inspection. The primary factor accounts for approximately 64.5% to 72.0% of the cumulative variance across experimental cohorts. All six items exhibit substantial factor loadings onto this primary factor:

• Unappealing – Appealing: $\lambda \approx .82 – .88$
• Unpleasant – Pleasant: $\lambda \approx .79 – .85$
• Boring – Dynamic: $\lambda \approx .71 – .78$
• Attractive – Unattractive (Reverse Scored): $\lambda \approx .74 – .81$
• Not entertaining – Entertaining: $\lambda \approx .83 – .89$
• Not beneficial – Beneficial: $\lambda \approx .68 – .76$

The lowest loading consistently belongs to Item 6 (“Not beneficial – Beneficial”), reflecting its cognitive-utilitarian tilt compared to the predominantly hedonic character of the remaining five items. Nevertheless, its retention provides essential coverage of functional game value without destabilizing the unidimensional structure.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analytic models testing a one-factor specification have demonstrated excellent goodness-of-fit indices across published empirical literature:

• Normed Chi-Square: $\chi^2 / df le 2.35$ (indicating satisfactory fit).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $.96$ to $.99$ (exceeding the standard $.95$ threshold).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $.95$ to $.98$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $.045$ to $.062$ (with 90% confidence intervals bounded below $.08$).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $.028$ to $.039$.

Attempts to model the scale as a two-factor structure (e.g., separating hedonic entertainment from utilitarian benefit) typically produce an excessively high inter-factor correlation ($r > .85$), resulting in poor model parsimony and confirming that the single-factor specification is the most theoretically and empirically appropriate representation.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Attitude Toward the Game Scale (ATGAME)
• Original Authors: Monika K. J. Waiguny, Michelle R. Nelson, and Bo Marko (2013)
• Construct Assessed: Overall evaluative and affective attitude toward an interactive video game or advergame
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computer-assisted web interview (CAWI) immediately following gameplay
• Total Item Count: 6 bipolar adjective pairs
• Response Scale: 7-point semantic differential scale (1 to 7)
• Time Required: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes
• Target Populations: Children (approx. age 8+ with comprehension assistance), adolescents, and adult video game players
• Scoring and Polarity Guidelines:
  • Items 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 are formatted with the negative anchor at value 1 and the positive anchor at value 7.
  • Item 4 (“Attractive – Unattractive”) is presented with the positive anchor on the left (value 1) and the negative anchor on the right (value 7), serving as an attention-check and polarity control.
  • Reverse Scoring: Item 4 must be reverse-scored prior to composite analysis: $\text{Item } 4_{\text{recoded}} = 8 – \text{Raw Response}$.
  • Composite Score Calculation: The global ATGAME score is calculated as the mean or sum of all six items (with Item 4 recoded). Scores range from 1.0 to 7.0 (or 6 to 42 for sum scores), where higher values indicate a substantially more favorable, positive attitude toward the game.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitude Toward the Game Scale was published in 2013 within the peer-reviewed study “How Advergame Content Influences Explicit and Implicit Brand Attitudes: When Violence Spills Over” in the Journal of Advertising (Volume 42, Issue 2-3). The copyright for the academic publication is held by the American Academy of Advertising and Taylor & Francis Group.

The scale items are accessible within the public academic literature and are widely utilized under fair use guidelines for non-commercial, educational, and scientific research without licensing fees. Researchers wishing to reproduce the scale verbatim in commercial testing, proprietary market research platforms, or commercial publications should consult the standard copyright permissions system of Taylor & Francis or contact the primary authors.

12. References

• Lang, A. (2000). The limited capacity model of mediated message processing. Journal of Communication, 50(1), 46–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2000.tb02833.x
• 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
• Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1957). The measurement of meaning. University of Illinois Press.
• Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60214-2
• Waiguny, M. K. J., Nelson, M. R., & Marko, B. (2013). How advergame content influences explicit and implicit brand attitudes: When violence spills over. Journal of Advertising, 42(2-3), 155–169. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2013.774590

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)