The Examination of Co-Presence, Motivational Profile and Collaborative Knowledge Conversion in MMOG Game-Play

An increasing number of educational researchers have started to adopt online game as an educational platform and suggest that MMOG has numerous exclusive features that may motivate gamers to acquire, share, integrate and create knowledge together through collaborative learning behavior in the MMOG game-play. However, the commonly agreed answers for the occurrence of collaborative learning behavior in MMOG and the motivation drivers for learning to occur in a MMOG context are still unknown.Based on our pilot study and the Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation and Self-determination Theory, we propose four hypotheses to examine the relationships between motivational profile and collaborative knowledge conversion. We also propose two new constructs based on the theory of ecological mutualism, pseudo-mutualistic co-presence and true-mutualistic co-presence, and examine their moderating effects on the relationships between motivational profile and collaborative knowledge conversion. This research provides important theoretical and practical implications to researchers, educators and game developers.