The issue of gender has been discussed in (many fields) the field of information systems (IS), such as information technology (Ahuja and Thatcher, 2005), web (Sanchez-Franco, 2006), Internet service providers (Sanchez Franco et al., 2009), instant messaging (Debrand & Johnson, 2008), e-commerce systems (Hwang, 2010), email (Debrand & Johnson, 2008) and blogs (Chai et al., 2012; Zhang et al., 2009).
In the past, females have exhibited lower Internet frequency usage than males, because they were more likely to be computer-phobic (Agbatogun and Banjo, 2010; Igbaria and Chakrabarti, 1990). Despite this, the past few years have shown an increase in Internet usage by females (Schumacher and Morahan-Martin, 2001). According to a survey from MIC (2013), more and more females are playing online games, and the market share of online gaming by females is showing an increasing trend.
This study thus proposes that gender plays an interesting role in the context of online gaming and looks to extend SCT's engagement with gender by examining the impact of internal factors (self-efficacy) and external factors (social influence) in the context of online gaming.