The components of the gaming consumption experience: From virtual realisation to real-world virtualisation

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) attract consumers looking for fun, experiences, and challenges. This research adopts an integrative perspective to focus on the gaming experience and its major components. This research studies how gaming affects real life and how real life affects virtual experience. We use in-depth interviews, a netnographic study, and a three-year ethnographic immersion. The results provide an overview of gamers’ consumption experience, its major components, and their links. MMORPGs appear to be a complex experience where virtual and real-life continuously interrelate. Gaming as a virtual experience affects gamers’ real lives (virtual realisation), and gamers’ real lives affect how they experience the game (real-world virtualisation). A significant contribution of our study is to show that gaming is not a process with clear, separated chronological steps. Gaming is an experience where boundaries between virtual and real-life are not delimited and where the virtual and real-life are far from disjointed experiences.