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The video game industry is one of the most rapidly growing industries globally. From 2012 to 2018, the value of the global video market has doubled its size from US$52.8 to 115.3bn (Wijman, 2019). Video games traditionally have been considered toxic to consumers (Sherry, 2001). Consistent with that view, large amounts of video game playing have been found to relate to consumers’ addiction and depression (Anderson et al., 2010; Lemola et al., 2011). However, more recently, it has been argued that playing video games has benefits, and research has found that playing video games is positively related to consumers’ cognitive skills (Uttal et al., 2013; Green and Seitz, 2015), persistence and effortful engagement (Granic et al., 2014; McGonigal, 2011), positive emotions and mood (Ryan et al., 2006) and social interaction (Ewoldsen et al., 2012), as well as young children’s sense of identity (Bassiouni and Hackley, 2016). Thus, video games have been used in a wide array of environments to help people such as education (Mitchell and Savill-Smith, 2004; Squire, 2003) and treatment of disease (Foss, 2017).
A major focus of consumer research on video games has been on how in-game marketing campaigns can be effective (Cianfrone and Zhang, 2009; Glass, 2007; Hang and Auty, 2011; Nelson, 2002; Yang et al., 2006). For instance, increasing the interactivity of product advertisements in video games can increase the effectiveness of the advertisements (Hang and Auty, 2011). As another example, repetition can enhance consumers’ brand recall in video games (Martí-Parreño et al., 2017). However, theory has failed to locate the target audience for each product or brand in the video game context. That is, to effectively target the right consumers requires a better understanding of consumers’ game choice preferences. Thus, the purpose of the current research is to understand how a consumer’s fundamental belief system (political ideology) shapes their game choice.
In the current research, we categorized games into two types – Persistent world and Non-persistent world. Persistent world games refer to games in which achievements (e.g. game character ability) in the games are accumulated. When players devote more time and effort to the game, their character becomes stronger. Examples of these games are role-playing games (e.g. The Witcher 3) and...