On the Tiny Yet Real Happiness Phenomenon in the Mobile Games Market

Abstract

This paper explores a counter-intuitive observation in the global mobile games market: that despite people in East Asian countries currently experiencing a challenging economic environment with lower disposable incomes and less leisure time than people in the West, they still spend much greater amounts of money on mobile gaming on a per-user basis. We link this situation to the tiny yet real happiness (TYRH) phenomenon: a term coined by Haruki Murakami, frequently rumored as a future recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in his 1986 book Afternoon at Langerhan's Island. The TYRH phenomenon describes that, due to structural inequality problems, people (especially the members of younger generations) may lose their ambition to actively develop their careers, and instead to cherish small, ordinary moments of bliss. More concretely, people implicated in this phenomenon tend to maintain an attitude of living in the moment without regard for their current and future lives, and may even retreat into various non-career-related activities, including mobile gaming. In this paper, we investigate the possible role of the TYRH phenomenon in influencing how smartphone users spend money (and time) on mobile games. We find that countries with long work hours, higher scores on the Gini index, lower unemployment rates, and lower life satisfaction are all associated with higher per-user spending on mobile games on both the App Store and Google Play platforms. This suggests that the TYRH phenomenon is indeed positively associated with mobile game-playing and spending behavior, and that countries where the phenomenon is more prominent are likely to contribute disproportionately to the mobile games market, now and in the future.