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Top1. Introduction
The rapid availability of the internet leads to the presence of a variety of online video games that attracted players worldwide. Recently, games that are interactive has achieved significant development in the area of game development. Video game players come from various ages, nationality, and occupation. The Entertainment Software Association (2017) found out that video game players are women, comprising 35% to 40% of the population and more than 72% of households play video games. A myriad of motivations exists why they play online video games (Mathews, 2017). These include the following:(1) players are connected to their inner child; (2) players have an outlet to escape from different stress in life; (3) players develop their creativity, strategic skills, and imagination; (4) players can gain friends by playing games; (5) players develop their eye, and hand coordination; and (6) players have something to look forward to. Yee (2006) examined these different motivations. While Granic et al. (2014) comprehensively outlined the benefits of playing video games, playing video games can lead to addiction (Kuss and Griffiths, 2012). This phenomenon is widely documented and reported in the current literature (Anderson and Dill, 2000; Ng and Wiemer-Hastings, 2005; Lemmens et al., 2009; Young, 2009; Kuss and Griffiths, 2012; Wittek et al., 2016; Bean et al., 2017) and will not be discussed here for brevity. Despite its ill-effects, recent works have demonstrated its benefits including cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social ones (Granic et al., 2014), improved working memory (Colzato et al., 2013), disaster learning (Gampell et al., 2017), and probabilistic learning (Schenk et al., 2017), among several others. This list is not intended to be comprehensive. This work aims not to contribute in this debate, but instead, it provides an evaluation of the acceptability of these video games to leverage on their benefits.
One of the most popular strategy video games is the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), it is also known as action real-time strategy (ARTS). It is a sub-genre of strategic video games in which player identify his/her character in a team to fight with the other team. The primary objective is to destroy the opposing team with the help of the skills of the chosen character. MOBA has attracted people who desire to put together quick strategies and have a good deal of time for the game. Given the popularity of these MOBA games, it is of full interest to determine an in-depth evaluation of its broad acceptance in the games industry. Lin and Lu (2011), proposed a model that explained the use of social networking sites in incorporating external factors and motivation theory. In the domain of information and communications technology (ICT), scholars are interested in determining the rigorous motivations of acceptance behind the actual usage of information systems. These are some of the models that can be used in explaining such usage: theory of reason action (Ajzen, 1975), motivational model (Davis et al, 1992), model of personal computer utilization (Thompson et al., 1991), unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (Venkatesh et al., 2003), theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991) and technology acceptance model (Davis, 1989).