Abstract
This study investigates the emergence of intellectual opportunism for game boosters in mobile social networks. It shows the supply and demand for upgrading game levels in mobile social networks. These supply and lucrative demand highlight a new temporary profession as game boosters. Game boosters facilitate framed newbie gamers who want to play at a higher game level without playing for a long time. This emergence of professionally game boosters is due to economic opportunism, promising their potential future incomes. Moreover, opportunistic mobile social networks (OMSNs) support the muscular appearance of the game booster profession. On the other hand, this study demonstrates that mobile social networks exploit hedonistic human needs by reflecting their behaviour and social relationships when building efficient and trustworthy business contracts. This study presents uniqueness supported by critical reasoning. First, it shows that the game booster phenomenon has emerged as a contemporary profession in society, promising future cash inflows above the average salaries of typical jobs. Second, this research demonstrates the sequential logic of economic opportunities, intellectual opportunism, and mobile social networks, constructing game boosters’ income generating. Nevertheless, this study acknowledges that the game booster profession has low integrity due to its members’ inconsistent and unprincipled virtues.
1. Introduction
This study highlights the unusual appearance of game boosters in developing countries like Indonesia. Moreover, it marks that this appearance strings together many conceptual paradigms such as moral hazards, economic opportunities, intellectual opportunities, professional jobs, and mobile social networks. The authors argue that the emergence of game boosters is economic sociology derived from social cognitive factors, communal innovativeness, and socioeconomic stratification. On the other hand, this research shows that mobile social networks support this emergence due to efficiently fulfilling human needs and their trustworthiness [1–4]. Meanwhile, it considers that human needs are the social and economic stratifications among primary, secondary, and tertiary ranks [5–7]; gaming enjoyment would probably be the latest fulfilment. Therefore, this study investigates this emergence of game boosters from the united sequential reasoning of economic opportunity and intellectual opportunism, constructing game boosters’ behaviour as the supply-side and newbie gamers asking the higher-level ones as the demand-side. Hence, it comprehends their behavioural efficiency and trustworthiness in fulfilling their needs.
Deepening the discussed contexts in this study, the authors explain the ontological definitions. First, this study uses moral hazard contextualising people’s free choice to do something or not, anchoring to their possessed ethical standards. Nevertheless, a person’s moral hazard can detriment others due to catching abnormal benefits with controlled risks [8–10]. Second, the authors use economic opportunities to explain a specific condition where people place their chances to do various transactional businesses. Moreover, they will benefit more from occupying these chances properly [3, 4, 11]. Third, this research utilises intellectual opportunism as the conceptual continuance for economic opportunities. The authors define intellectual opportunism as people’s intelligence implemented to get special favours that are genuinely intended [12–14]. However, we argue that these people can come likely from selfishness, self-interest, or altruism. Finally, this research employs mobile social networks (MSN), in which people use information tools to make their social relationships. Moreover, it argues that people widely use the MSN for enterprising their business activities [4, 15, 16]. Thus, this study uses all concepts to explain the game booster profession to gain economic value-added.
This study supports the emergence of game boosters with the unique argumentation below. First, it shows phenomenal evidence of game boosters on the supply side and beginners on the demand side in mobile social networks. This research indicates that being a game booster is a new profession, promising higher incomes than usual. Then, the authors consider this recent phenomenon as socioeconomic stratification [8, 17, 18]. This phenomenon appears in the social cognition of young people looking for a livelihood due to liberalised mobile networks [19–21]. Finally, the study shows the game booster supply by offering their services. Simultaneously, game beginners demand their upgraded expertise levels. It collects many offers and requests for game boosters facilitated by opportunistic mobile social networks (OMSNs), as presented in Figure 1.
Second, this study explains the emergence of new professional jobs, defined by sequential critical reasoning of economic opportunities, intellectual opportunism, moral hazards, and game boosters’ income generating. In addition, it argues that young people perceive existing economic opportunities by utilising mobile social networks [16, 22, 23]. Moreover, they capture these opportunities because they have the relevant capabilities to operate in these social networks. Furthermore, the authors argue that young people are usually experts in using social media to fulfil their needs, although they should judge their moral hazards by employing opportunistic behaviour [9, 10, 15, 24]. In other words, they undertake intellectual opportunism for prospective businesses to gain future benefits. By these means, they have the intellectual capabilities and competencies to work in these new jobs as game boosters, dealing with mental shallowness. Finally, the authors believe that economic opportunities boost their behavioural game, accompanied by young people’s intellectual opportunism. Hence, they perceive these new professional jobs within their moral hazards as guaranteeing an income.
Third, this research demonstrates the primary facilitators of OMSNs. Moreover, it argues that mobile social networks facilitate opportunistic contacts, meaning the mechanistic communication of user-to-user routing paths. Then, the users of mobile social networks could work efficiently and be trustworthy [4, 25–27]. In other words, mobile social networks develop to behave in social relationships with a more efficient and trustworthy message transfer scheme. This study infers that the supply-side of game boosters and the demand-side of game users believe that this information in social media networks is efficient economic costs and trustworthy disseminated transactions [28–30]. Therefore, they do their transactional financial practices without any doubt and gain benefits. For example, the game boosters play games instantly to be rewarded with a fee. On the other hand, the game users demand to be served by these game boosters to increase the level of the experts by paying the price. Moreover, the game boosters and these users will likely form business partnerships due to unlimited social relationships [1, 31, 32]. They also believe these transactions would be conducted in a secure environment, uninterrupted by others.
This study refers inductively to the concepts and theories of economic opportunity, intellectual opportunism, moral hazard, and a professional job guaranteeing an income. Simultaneously, it considers mobile social networks that are efficient and trustworthy in explaining behavioural game boosters and increasing expert-level users. This research firstly posits Conroy et al. [8]; Liu et al. [29]; Manganelli and Nicita [20]; Yen and Hung [32] by describing the supply-side and demand-side of game boosters because of spontaneous equilibrium in the gaming market. Then, from these sides, new entrepreneurial businesses emerge for young people to serve the deviated economic reality [11, 33–35]. The second cluster of theories includes young people’s intellectual opportunism and moral hazards to becoming professional game boosters [15, 16, 36, 37]. Moreover, this study explains that most young people sacrifice their moral hazards because of their motives to get financial benefits [2, 3, 10, 38]. Furthermore, it demonstrates the young people’s choice of popular professional jobs, such as game boosters, by ignoring principled careerism found in reputable jobs. Hence, it infers that young people intellectually choose opportunism and work as professional game boosters, guaranteeing an income [12, 36, 39, 40]. Finally, it also considers that professional game boosters exist because of the shallow motives of today’s youth.
Secondly, this research refers to extant studies concentrating on OMSNs, including efficiency and trustworthiness. It posits Danovitch [41]; Domoff et al. [42]; Kim and Rao [16]; Krawczyk and Kułakowski [43]; Lin et al. [28]; Venkatesh et al. [44] by explaining end-to-end communication models for message exchanges. Whether the game boosters and users utilise the information and communication technology (ICT) for their social relationships or not, they benefit from this ICT. So then, this ICT has a role as an opportunistic mobile social network [1, 10, 15, 39]. The authors infer that those game boosters and novice gamers asking to enhance scored-expertise levels are those people considering their behavioural opportunism and moral hazards to gain financial motives. Nevertheless, they genuinely believe that these mobile social networks guarantee efficiency and trustworthiness [4, 25, 45] for holding their contracted game transactions. Hence, the authors acknowledge that social networks in ICT promise low costs and a short time to practice these transactions. Simultaneously, reliable social networks support trustworthiness among game boosters and the novice gamers’ enhancing expert levels due to their nuisances of message exchanges.
This study contributes to the public awareness of the emergence of contemporary professions, such as game boosters, and the attribution to intellectual opportunism. It suggests that young people prefer to be game boosters for popularity and gain economic benefits. In other words, it indicates that the profession of game boosters is a career that lacks integrity or intellectual shallowness [2, 38, 43, 46]. Likewise, this research states that their lack of knowledge causes them to choose a game booster, furtherly making them more selfish [14, 27, 29, 47]. Finally, it reminds society that it should eliminate the emergence of intellectual opportunism so people do not become unprincipled and create illegitimate cultures inducting young people’s behavioural cognition. In addition, young game boosters should undergo therapy to make them cognitively aware of their privileged status. Moreover, society intensively changes the potential cultures of young people’s intellectual opportunities, transforming them into flexible, agile, and persuasive assets.
The second contribution is a demand for game developers to consider the emergence of young people’s intellectual opportunities and moral hazards, which can cause selfish motives [17, 48–50]. This study argues that the game developers must tighten their games’ account systems with a rigid and secure gamer identification, so gamers cannot exchange or trade their accounts with each other. Maybe, strengthening the gamers’ accounts is mandatory with multiple biometrical or physical recognition needed to gain access to play the game. Thus, there is still some economic opportunism in the mobile social networks; the game management systems can eliminate the intellectual opportunism and moral hazards of the young people’s selfish motives [9, 10, 16, 17]. In other words, this process can raise the knowledge level of young people’s awareness, so they retain adaptive, agile, and flexible attitudes and behaviour, which are more beneficial for their future lives. Thus, this study recommends the vital transformation from the adverse to positive usage of OMSNs.
The remains of this paper discuss literature reviews containing articles on economics, intellectual opportunism, and mobile social networks and construct the hypotheses in Section 2. Section 3 deals with the research methods, describing the surveys with a quasi-experimental design and testing the structural equation model. Finally, Section 4 discusses the statistical results, their inference, and the study’s findings.
2. Literature Review and Hypothesis Development
2.1. Economic Opportunity for Game Boosters
Economic opportunism is a school of thought that believes the economy never reaches perfect equilibrium because of innovation and market imbalances. This study describes the perspective of economic opportunity, whose primary focus is discovery, creation, and actualisation [2, 4, 11, 17] in the emergence of mobile games and social networks. Furthermore, this study believes that discovering and creating a new temporary profession as a game booster with high gaming knowledge creates a new economic equilibrium. Opportunity actualisation occurs when game boosters find and create a new high-prospect market. Thus, the perspective of actualising this innovation is sustainable to facilitate consumer priorities [5, 16, 31, 50]. Furthermore, when gamers with high ICT skills can identify opportunities, they can use their capabilities and competencies to generate an income. Thus, game boosters as actors of economic opportunity can occupy a vacant position in the financial arena and improve the economy.
This study argues that economic opportunities are freedom of choice for people living globally. However, economic opportunities open up in two positive and negative directions because of the inherent moral hazard of humans [3, 36, 51]. Especially for game boosters, economic opportunities lead to adverse choices in supporting young people embedded by their moral hazards to achieve income growth. On the other hand, young people with a high level of knowledge about ICT and social networks act shirking choosing high-income generating [8, 10, 27] can find work as a game booster. Moreover, the choice of undertaking this type of work means that young people do not want to pursue a lengthy professional career [11, 13, 37, 52]. In other words, young people who work as game boosters act like shirking compared to regular professional jobs. In other words, they are selfish, primarily choosing to promote games for financial reasons. Finally, this study summarises that the openness of economic opportunities simultaneously coincides with moral hazards and the emergence of a new contemporary profession as game boosters.
2.2. Intellectual Opportunism and Moral Hazards
Intellectual opportunism describes human abilities and their brilliant and competent capacities, which they furtherly use to capture opportunities. From another perspective, humans actualise their intellectual skills to analyse, take advantage of, and seize opportunities to make themselves economically valuable [14, 36, 53]. For example, gamers, who are usually highly intelligent, could identify every opportunity to create economic value by undertaking activities that have some business value [14, 45, 48]. This study indicates that intellectual opportunism is closely related to the game boosters’ behaviour to get more economic benefits by playing games on social networks. Likewise, intellectual opportunism always aligns with individuals’ moral hazards, leading to beneficial opportunities to generate financial gains.
This study stands for a neutral status for intellectual opportunism’s position. It argues that intellectual opportunism depends on people’s moral hazards: consistent and principled self-control or inconsistent, uncredible, and unprincipled. Concerning the game boosters’ profession, this study elaborates that the game booster job is irresponsible, unbelievable, and unethical for individuals’ integrity [11, 52, 54]. It means that those game boosters are individuals with low self-control because they have no self-consistency, and their chosen profession does not have unprincipled clarity. In other words, the game boosters merely pursue temporary popularity and financial gains [25, 36, 55, 56]. Furthermore, this research indicates that intellectual opportunism is characterised by the profession’s self-promotion, marked by a low need for integrity [12, 40]. Thus, this study summarises that a game booster represents inconsistent and unprincipled self-control and self-promotion with low integrity due to the pursuit of substantial financial gains.
2.3. Professionally Income
This study explains two kinds of professions for gaming on social networks. One side is a profession that competes on social networks with various game types. The gaming profession in this competition is called electronic sports. This study views these electronic sports (esports) as having positive intellectual opportunism and moral hazards. Esports are a testament to the dynamic developments in gaming culture. Furthermore, this esports phenomenon has become very popular and essential for the gamer community. Thus, esport athletes play games for fun and recreation and as a profession [37, 50, 57]. Funk et al. [13] define that esports requires mental strength, skill, and experience to win the competitions. Consequently, esport athletes practice and improve their skills before starting a contest. This research infers that esport athletes place intellectual opportunism and moral hazards with professionally consistent, credible, and principled integrity.
On the other hand, this study shows that another side of the gamer profession utilises economic opportunism without a competitive arena to gain abnormal financial revenues. Moreover, it discloses that game boosters take financial advantage of intellectual opportunism [58–60] due to business opportunities that promise high potential incomes. The authors explain the emergent phenomenon of many gamers choosing to be game boosters for payment due to expert-level enhancers. The gamification system gave rise to a new phenomenon and has become very popular among online gamers [29, 61, 62]. Game boosters and gamers usually have a mutualistic relationship. However, game boosters aim to earn income as service providers, while ordinary players, as consumers, seek satisfaction from higher-level games [58, 61, 63]. This study underlines that the intellectual opportunism and moral hazards associated with adverse selections cause young people to work as game boosters. Moreover, it explains that game boosters are inconsistent and unprincipled individuals with little self-control due to them achieving a degree of popularity and extensive financial benefits.
2.4. OMSNs, Efficiency, and Trustworthiness
Young people who become game boosters search for a financial advantage in the social networks and offer and realise contracted business to enhance scored-expertise levels. This utilisation continues the economic opportunities, intellectual opportunism, and moral hazards for young people trying to earn money. The utilisation mechanism occurs because social networks facilitate user-to-user communications that can be done quickly, and the opportunities for business relationships and transactions become more confidential [3, 4, 47]. The authors argue that mobile social networks present the most extraordinary possibilities for business relationships and facilitating opportunism, as explained by the intellectual opportunities offered [31, 32, 64]. On the other hand, this study illustrates that the game boosters exploit social networks because of the centralistic closeness, enabling the high probability of contracted business transactions [4, 51, 65]. Next, this study demonstrates that game boosters run the communication process as a direct link that defragments long sequential processes into short ones.
Because of their efficiency and trustworthiness, opportunistic mobile social networks could facilitate game boosters and users’ demands for higher expert levels. Efficiency shows the ability to join users with other users quickly and at a low cost. This efficiency also refers to individuals’ effortless sacrifices to achieve business contract certainty [43, 66]. Likewise, trustworthiness shows the aligned goals and missions between game boosters and novice gamers needing to become expert-level players to agree on business transactions made with confidential and mutual trust [26, 28, 51]. However, OMSNs remain in the reasoning domain of opportunistic actions because game boosters and users demanding higher expert levels engage in opportunistic relationships in social networks [4, 8, 15, 27]. This study explains that the opportunistic nature lies in the motives of game boosters and users demanding higher expert levels when contracting business on social networks. Meanwhile, it demonstrates that efficiency and trustworthiness are positively beneficial characteristics of mobile social networks that support game boosters and users who demand higher expertise to realise their contracted business transactions.
2.5. Hypothesis Development
Game users and boosters usually feel and catch an economic opportunity when a game application is loaded globally on a computer network. This study acknowledges that game boosters consistently indicate their knowledge of the gaming environment [5, 26, 43, 67]. When game boosters identify economic opportunities that could probably generate financial gains from gaming activities, they actualise their ability to seize these economic opportunities [2, 13, 46, 68]. In other words, the authors demonstrate that an economic opportunity becomes the game boosters’ belief that furtherly affects actualising their intellectual opportunism. Meanwhile, game boosters actualise intellectual opportunism when they ignore the moral hazards by demonstrating inconsistent and unprincipled self-control. Thus, this study argues that game boosters’ intellectual opportunism gradually increases because they view high economic opportunities with a degree of certainty. Therefore, this study formulates hypothesis H1.
H1. Game boosters’ perceived economic opportunities positively affect them and increase their intellectual opportunism.
This study explains that game boosters feel that efficient communication arises with OMSNs. Therefore, they try to take advantage of it as an opportunity to get an abnormal income. The authors explain that OMSNs combine ICT games and social networks simultaneously. Social networks’ performance, associated with game boosters’ social behaviour, utilises OMSNs, even though they behave adversely or shirk their responsibilities [4, 15, 36, 69]. Meanwhile, trustworthiness becomes crucial to building the relationship between the game booster and the users demanding higher-expert levels. This study argues that OMSNs accommodate these relationships [1, 3, 70, 71]. By utilising ICT, game boosters can build mutual trust with other users. Moreover, this research highlights that OMSNs facilitate mutual trust by each party, realising efficiency and trustworthiness to take advantage of these opportunities. Therefore, this study argues that the established OMSNs are contracted business relationships based on high efficiency and trustworthiness between the parties who need each other. Thus, it constructs the hypotheses H2and H3.
H2. Game boosters’ perceived efficiency affects them and causes them to use OMSNs positively.
H3. Game boosters’ perceived trustworthiness affects them positively and causes them to use OMSNs.
This study argues that intellectual opportunism could be realised in OMSNs. OMSNs accommodate and facilitate game boosters with high individual intelligence to analyse, exploit, and actualise their competencies when given the opportunity. Furthermore, game boosters’ intellectual opportunism is closely related to outlets such as OMSNs, so they can obtain abnormal economic values by acting as level enhancers, even though others consider it a violation of fair play [2, 14, 72]. The authors argue that game boosters realise their intellectual opportunism in OMSNs as inconsistent and unprincipled professionals due to their low integrity when searching for abnormal benefits [11, 27, 73]. Therefore, OMSNs are very important for game boosters as an arena for their high intelligence, although they relate to common morality. Moreover, this study shows that game boosters’ low characteristics are associated with their unethically adverse selections, taking financial gains from business opportunities as their source of income, broadening their businesses, and redoing their business contracts. Thus, this study constructs hypotheses H4, H5, and H6.
H4. The emergence of game boosters’ intellectual opportunism positively affects them and causes them to use OMSNs.
H5. The emergence of game boosters’ intellectual opportunism positively affects their intention to broaden their businesses positively.
H6. The emergence of game boosters’ intellectual opportunism positively affects their intention to redo their business contracts positively.
This study argues that when game boosters are in OMSNs, they are in an incumbent position that is facilitated and accommodated to obtain financial gains on an ongoing basis. Over time, they experience satisfying and addictive behaviour from their work. This study argues that game boosters’ comfortable and addictive behaviour makes their mental shallowness try to expand their businesses and continue with other contracts [34, 49, 74, 75]. From another perspective, this study demonstrates that inconsistent and unprincipled professional game boosters, accompanied by high financial gains, support themselves and become more involved in these jobs. The game boosters would be more engaged because their profession is still unregulated, making them more laissez-faire. Therefore, this study arranges hypotheses H7 and H8.
H7. Using OMSNs affects game boosters’ intentions to broaden their businesses positively.
H8. Using OMSNs affects game boosters’ intentions to redo their business contracts positively.
From all the hypotheses developed, this study constructed its research models. This study built three models to validate its critical reasoning associations. Model A was the parsimonious research model, using the economic opportunity, intellectual opportunism, intention to broaden, and intention to redo business contracts. Model C combines the previous two models while model B adds OMSNs as an intervening, including trustworthiness and efficiency. This research model has game boosters’ intellectual opportunism and OMSNs intervening to explain their intention to broaden and redo their business contracts. Moreover, this research posits Sagala and Sumiyana [76] and Sriwidharmanely et al. [77] with a quasi-experiment. This study presents its three models in Figures 2(a)–2(c).
(a)
(b)
(c)
3. Research Method
3.1. Data Collection and Variable Measurement
This study collected its data using a web questionnaire. First, it sent the questionnaire via Google Forms to each respondent in Indonesia. Then, it accumulated the data for four months, giving the respondents time to reply. Next, the authors sent questionnaires to individuals who are game boosters. This research identified that these respondents were game boosters and users demanding high-expert levels through social media messages on Instagram, Telegram, Facebook, TikTok, etc. The authors also checked the respondents’ frequency of game-playing every day. As a result, we successfully collected respondents (55.8% male and 44.2% female) who are game boosters aged between 16 and 25 years old. Moreover, this study determines the old ranges due to having preliminary authors’ investigative survey before data collection. Furthermore, it protected the respondents’ confidentially, and it surveyed them without any obligation for them to put their name, date of birth, or address on the questionnaire.
This study investigated economic opportunity, intellectual opportunism, and OMSNs, including efficiency and trustworthiness. Moreover, this study conducted a quasi-experiment to capture the game boosters’ intention to broaden and redo their contracting businesses. This research used an individual unit of analysis, the game booster, or the user demanding high-expert levels, by exposing their advertisements. Furthermore, it took respondents from Indonesian game boosters. It used a five-point Likert scale in the study’s questionnaire, as presented in Table 1. The authors collected and then selected variables that several extant studies had used previously. Moreover, we checked that some former studies had tested the face and content validities. Hence, this study made minor modifications so that the questionnaire’s items matched the aim of this study.
3.2. Statistical Test
After collecting the data from the respondents, this study conducted tests to establish the data’s validity and reliability. Then, this study tested all the hypotheses using structural equation modelling (SEM) to determine the causal relationship among the variables constructed in this study’s model. It then measured each model to assess its goodness of fit compared to the normative-standard values. Finally, this study considered the model’s suitability with the criteria of its goodness of fit, such as its minimum chi-square, degree of freedom (CMIN/DF), comparative fit index (CFI), Akaike information criterion (Zaichkowsky), Tucker-Lewis index (TLI), and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA).
4. Statistical Results and Findings
4.1. Descriptive Statistics, Validity, and Reliability
This study collected data through Google Forms disbursed to approximately 93 Indonesian cities. It took four months to collect the respondents. This study periodically controlled the cumulative collected data and examined the data’s reliability, validity, and the three models’ goodness of fit, as is done when using artificial intelligence for data analysis. Three hundred one respondents showed that these statistical tests fulfilled the models’ nomological validity and reliability. However, the authors believe that cut-off collected data from 487, 504, and 606 respondents would improve the statistical reliability, validity, and the models’ goodness of fit. So, we stopped collecting data once we had 702 respondents. This study inferred that most game boosters were university students living in Java. Moreover, this study did not eliminate any of the data. Table 2 shows the respondents’ demographic information.
Table 3 presents the minimum, maximum, mean, and standard deviation values of the 702 respondents. The data set showed a minimum value of one for each variable and a maximum weight of five. The total data showed that all these variables have mean values of more than 3.00. In addition, the economic opportunity variable had a mean value of more than 4.00. Valuing the standard deviations, the authors believed that the association among the variables in this study’s models would be dominantly supported. This study also measured skewness and kurtosis, showing that the ratio was 0 to +1. Finally, this study inferred that each variable was on statistically normal data distribution. Therefore, it concluded that the descriptive statistics met the standardised statistical criteria, supporting each hypothesis and the research models.
Table 4 shows that the factor loading values of each item were more than 0.5. Then, this research concluded that the data gained high validity. Moreover, the AVE values of each variable were more than 0.5, showing an outstanding measure of convergent validity. Simultaneously, this study inferred that the sum of the AVE values’ square roots was lower than their factor loading, showing the discriminant validity. Furthermore, the indicators of these latent variables were more than half of these variances, supporting the discriminant and convergent validities. The reliability test used Cronbach’s alpha; the values of each variable were above 0.8. Thus, it inferred that these variables collected data from the question items, which were reliable. In addition, it used composite reliability to measure the data representing game boosters’ behavioural realities, which showed a value above 0.8, meaning they gained high reliability. Furthermore, it analysed these associations among the variable associations in all the models because the validity and reliability met the normative standard criteria.
4.2. Model Results
Table 5 presents the statistical results for the models’ nomological validity. This study fulfils all the models’ criteria, so they were a high goodness of fit. The statistical results showed that the CMIN/DF was 0.091 for model A, 0.074 for model B, and 0.073 for model C. Moreover, the statistical analyses of the goodness of fit were excellent, with the RMSEA, CFI, TLI, and AIC scores also showing outstanding goodness of fit levels. This research, therefore, achieved nomological validity for all three models. Hence, it interpreted all the associations from all the models.
Table 6 shows the statistical results for all the hypotheses’ causality tests. Again, all the hypotheses in the research models were supported at a significance level of 1.00%. Hypothesis H1 proposed that economic opportunities affect the emergence of intellectual opportunism. The statistical results supported this hypothesis, with a coefficient value of 0.583 and a critical ratio (C.R.) value of 8.10. This hypothesis was statistically significant at the 1.00% level in model A and consistent in model B and model C. Hypothesis H2 stated that efficiency affects OMSNs with a coefficient value of 0.471 and a C.R. value of 14.20. This hypothesis was statistically significant at the 1.00% level in model B and model C, supporting hypothesis H2. Finally, hypothesis H3 had statistical results similar to hypothesis H2 in models B and C. Therefore, it endorsed hypothesis H3 for the association between trustworthiness and OMSNs.
This study supported hypothesis H4 in models B and C, which stated that game boosters’ intellectual opportunism positively affects their OMSNs’ usage. The statistical results supported this hypothesis, with coefficient values of 0.086 and 0.045 and C.R. values of 5.46 and 2.62, respectively, in models B and C. Therefore, this research concluded that hypothesis H4 was supported in both models. Hypothesis H5 stated that game boosters’ intellectual opportunism affects their intention to broaden their business contracts with coefficient values of 0.458 and 0.138 and C.R. values of 11.61 and 3.78, respectively, for models A and C. This study supported hypothesis H5. Hence, it was concluded that game boosters practice their intellectual opportunism to hold on to their prospective businesses. Thus, the future benefits and unprincipled integrity drive game boosters to keep and actualise their business contracts with expert-level demanders. Hypothesis H6 was also supported in models A and C. The statistical results supported the association between intellectual opportunism and the game boosters’ intention to redo their businesses contracts positively, with coefficient and C.R. values of 0.433 and 0.102 and 11.06 and 15.44, respectively, in models A and C. Finally, this study concluded that game boosters intensively redo their business contracts to capture future potential benefits.
Hypothesis H7 stated that OMSNs’ utilisation affects their intention to broaden their business contracts with coefficient values of 0.969 and 0.868 and C.R. values of 17.04 and 15.40, respectively, for model B and model C. Therefore, this study supported hypothesis H7. Then, it concluded that game boosters utilise OMSNs to hold their intellectual opportunism to maintain their business contracts, supported by efficiency and trustworthiness. Thus, the OMSNs facilitate game boosters to keep and socialise their business contracts with expert-level demanders. Therefore, hypothesis H8 was supported in models B and C, supporting the association between OMSNs’ utilisations and game boosters’ intentions to redo their contracting businesses positively. The coefficient and C.R. values are 0.989 and 0.913 and 16.45 and 15.44, respectively, in models B and C. Finally, this study inferred that those game boosters intensively redid their business contracts due to OMSNs facilitating low business integrity.
4.3. Research Findings
This study finds that an opportunistic profession as game boosters exists due to the promise of enormous compensation for expert-level enhancers. It also shows that the emerging computer games in social networks create economic opportunities for these new temporary game boosters. Nevertheless, it argues that this profession has low integrity with inconsistent and unprincipled employment opportunities [37, 50, 57]. The authors explain youths’ emergence of intellectual opportunism as game boosters in the OMSNs [31, 32, 64]. Then, we demonstrate that young people’s moral hazards dominate their chosen intellectual jobs, as game boosters prefer an unregulated profession [25, 36, 55, 56]. Furthermore, this study concludes that professional game boosters shirk their job choices measured by what youths have to do for their long-term livelihood with job-regularised careers. In other words, it demonstrates that young people make poor choices for their temporarily chosen professions, compared to their inner honesty, which supports universal societal welfare. Hence, professional popularity and temporary idols strengthen those young people’s adverse preferences by quickly gaining a significant income.
This study highlights that the intellectual opportunism emerging from mobile social networks shows that young people today have low integrity. It comprehends that young people’s low integrity, with the signified self-promotion of their chosen profession, boosts advertisements in the OMSNs. From the behavioural perspective, these young people are individuals with low self-control due to their preferential choice of the short-momentum money-oriented work [11, 13, 37, 52]. Moreover, this research shows that OMSNs support young people’s intellectual opportunism to be game boosters by characterising their efficiency and trustworthiness [4, 8, 15, 27]. It explains that game boosters could enhance expert-level efficiency through OMSNs, by facilitating social relationships [26, 28, 51]. On the other hand, OMSNs are a social networking tool that improves game boosters’ beliefs in making business contracts [4, 51, 65]. They believe the amateur gamers’ demand for enhanced expert levels. Due to repetitive validity checks, they also trust the quality of the information uploaded in the OMSNs. Finally, this study demonstrates that intellectual opportunism or moral hazards, economic opportunities, and the OMSNs unite three angular concepts that cognitively construct the emergence of game boosters.
This study’s findings impact industrial game providers by constraining the emergence of too many game boosters. Moreover, it has social concerns about young people not seeking regular careers that provide a livelihood. It also reaccentuates that game boosters are inconsistent and have unprincipled integrity due to searching for jobs that make them popular or even famous [58–60, 78]. Consequently, game providers should facilitate the game players who run social network games by ensuring the games are controlled by requiring continuous personal identification checks. In other words, game providers must decide whether the social network games could capture the users’ replacements with biometric or physically marked recognition during the sequential playing time. The most crucial phenomenon is when game boosters became a youth culture with remarkable mental shallowness [34, 49, 74, 79]. The authors demonstrate that these game providers should consider public concerns to prevent young people from emerging with intellectual opportunism, harmful moral hazards, and shirking their responsibilities regarding their future life. Moreover, we argue that young people should be directed toward constructive behaviour for the country’s economic development with principled-regular careers.
This study has a second consequence for industrial game developers to detect sharp increases in the levels during a game’s running period. It argues that the sharp increases in the levels are probably game boosters exploiting mobile social networks for their business [12, 36, 40, 69]. For example, if a user plays a game with a swiftly increasing level, the game provider marks this user and bans or suspends him/her. Therefore, game providers must develop mobile social networks equipped with artificial intelligence to detect unrealistically enhanced levels. In other words, game providers should complement their social network games with a dashboard measuring the abnormally enhanced levels denominated by users’ mean scores, considering their standard deviation. On the other hand, the game providers should accompany the mobile games on social networks with a whistle-blowing menu for identifying game boosters, such as a dialogue report for sarcastic words, away from the keyboard, and cheats. Finally, this study could reduce the opportunistic level in the OMSNs, so it becomes a moral principle that guides game boosters toward suitable professional careers and includes fairness, honesty, and equality.
5. Conclusion and Future Research
This study concludes that the emergence of game boosters is a phenomenon in developing countries like Indonesia. Most game boosters are students and disguised unemployed people seeking an income. They choose the game booster profession because economic opportunities promise future abnormal gains. Moreover, this study explains that game boosters, embedded by their intellectual opportunism, could capture these economic opportunities that align with their moral hazards, shirking behaviour, and adverse selections. On the other hand, OMSNs support game boosters’ behaviour by facilitating trustworthiness and efficiency. Finally, game boosters enjoy and become addicted to these unregulated situations, helping them intensively broaden and redo their business contracts to enhance the expert levels of the demanders. Hence, this study recommends that this phenomenon has to be smoothly eliminated due to its low integrity, marked by inconsistent and unprincipled work. This study suggests that society’s concerns should direct young people to search for professional careers with long-run economic capacities.
This research recognises that its models’ designs ignore game boosters’ cognitive biases. In other words, it did not investigate the attitude and behavioural aspects of the game boosters’ profession. Therefore, this study offers new research focusing on the cognitive biases influencing young people to choose the game booster profession. Secondly, this study opens opportunities to investigate young people’s attitudes and behavioural transformations from these harmful moral hazards and opportunistic behaviour, including shirking and adverse selection, to gain greater moral integrity. This shift would help young people’s moral degradation by accentuating ways to a better life with a forward-looking orientation. In other words, this study is concerned with society’s anxieties about young people’s awareness of morals and the need for consistent job integrity for their future. Future research could consider changing a model to a qualitative or case method grounded in a philosophical-based paradigm. Thus, this prospective study denotes the young people’s causal cognition for their preferent choices as game boosters.
Data Availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflicting interests.
Acknowledgments
The Gadjah Mada University’s Research Directorate of 2021 financed this research up to publication.