Demand for Commitment in Online Gaming: A Large-Scale Field Experiment

Video gaming is now the leisure activity that people spend significant amount of time on. Although there are increasing concerns that some players play more than they would like to a priori, the phenomenon is as yet poorly studied.1 Chow (2011) studied players of a popular type of online games called Massive Multi-player Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG), but the paper suffered from three shortcomings: a small sample size, a short duration and no within-subject variation in treatment assignments. This paper presents a second experiment designed to address those issues. In this experiment we had the advantage of having a very large subject pool, but with the drawback of only being able to measure game-playing statistics.