Why is This Happening to Me?: How Player Attribution can Broaden our Understanding of Player Experience.

Games user research (GUR) measures the performance and preference of digital game players, and interprets these measurements in the context of theories that explain human behavior. There are many validated approaches for measuring player experience that are grounded in psychological theories on motivation and emotion. Attribution theory explains how people assign causes to events and how these attributions affect peoples' emotional reactions and motivations. In this paper we argue that attribution theory can provide additional value to the existing suite of GUR tools; however, there are currently no validated tools to assess player attribution in the context of games. This paper describes the conceptualization of player attribution based on literature, presents the development and validation of a scale to assess player attribution in games, and discusses the implications of adding player attribution to the toolbox of methods for the design and evaluation of digital games.