Gaming motivations and sustained user engagement among highly engaged players

Video gaming constitutes a widespread and immersive domain of interaction with digital technologies, providing a valuable context for examining motivational processes underlying sustained user engagement. This study analyses the motivational structure of highly engaged community-based players recruited in a naturalistic gaming environment without clinical screening for gaming disorder and examines the multidimensional structure of the Videogaming Motives Questionnaire (VMQ) within this population. Survey data were collected at a major gaming fair and examined using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with group comparisons. The findings support the eight-factor structure of the VMQ and indicate that behavioural characteristics, including frequency of play, session duration, and genre preferences, are more strongly associated with motivational orientations than demographic variables such as age or gender. These findings provide support for the structural coherence of the VMQ within a highly engaged adult sample and identify genre as an important contextual factor associated with motivational alignment.