Achievement, enjoyment and social interaction are all motivations for starting to play an online game, with success at the game and the extent to which gamers' uses were gratified predicting continuance in playing.[36] In 2017, researchers applied UGT to study user behavior among Pokémon Go players. Results show that enjoyment, physical activity, nostalgia, image, normative influences and flow drive various forms of user behavior. In addition, perceived physical risks, but not perceived privacy risks, lead to weaker forms of usage.[
Research has shown that media taken in for entertainment purposes have a wide range of uses and emotional gratifications,[38] and that these are not mutually exclusive but can overlap with each other. Rehman (1983) demonstrated a relationship between gratifications sought and obtained from the movies and movie attendance. The most prominently cited emotional gratification of media use of mood management. UGT proposes that eople prefer to maintain a state of intermediate arousal. When in a bad mood, bored, or over-aroused, people will seek media as regulation for or distraction from their mood.[39][40] Another emotional gratification is affective disposition, which involves people experiencing gratificaition when rooting for characters depicted as good and moral.[41] Other emotional gratifications include excitation transfer,[42] sensation seeking,[43] downward social comparison,[44][45] mood adjustment,[46][47] and competence.[48]
Additionally, the modes of reception of entertainment media correlates with emotion involvement and can facilitate the pursuit of other goals.[49][50] Entertainment media allows users to live out gender-socialised roles,[51][52][53] satisfy parasocial relationships,[54][55][56] live vicariously through fictional characters,[57][58][59] and find meaning and purpose.