If You Build It Will They Come? An Empirical Investigation of Facilitators and Inhibitors of Hedonic Virtual World Acceptance

Although virtual worlds depend on attracting and retaining a critical mass of users to flourish, theoretical models which seek specifically to predict virtual world acceptance remain sparse. This begs the question, why do individuals decide to participate in virtual worlds? Based upon a mixed methods study, we develop and empirically test an integrative framework to address this question by extending the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) in two ways. First, we identify important hedonic factors which complement the utilitarian ones proposed in UTAUT. Second, this study investigates the influence of inhibitors to virtual world (un)acceptance. Our findings indicate that while hedonic expectancies have significant predictive power, inhibitors as additional predictors of virtual world acceptance did not explain any additional variance in user intentions. These findings suggest that existing technology acceptance models should incorporate hedonic influences, especially in the examination of the acceptance and diffusion of technologies that are fun.