Deconstructing Engagement: A Design-Theoretic Framework for Participation Propensity under Uncertainty

Game analytics has established powerful methods for understanding what happens in player behavior through behavioral metrics and data-driven optimization [7]. However, to fully interpret why certain structural configurations produce observed behavioral patterns, analytics requires a complementary qualitative layer-a structural context that explains the causal mechanisms behind the data. This paper proposes a design-theoretic auditing framework for analyzing participation propensity in interactive systems. Rather than modeling engagement as a monolithic psychological state, participation is characterized as a tension between short-term engagement propensity and long-term value pursuit, moderated by the system's Value Scope (SV), which reflects the transferability of outcomes beyond the system boundary. The framework decomposes the participation decision space into seven analytically separable dimensions, including Outcome Payoff, Total Cost, Temporal Commitment, Motivation, Failure Cost, and Risk. This decomposition is not claimed to be formally minimal or predictive, but is constructed to support structured design auditing by distinguishing often-conflated mechanisms such as sunk cost versus failure cost, and by introducing risk entanglement as a systemic amplification factor in multi-agent settings. By framing participation as a rational auditing process rather than a purely experiential response, this work aims to provide designers and researchers with an analytical lens for diagnosing structural causes of engagement failure beyond empirical retention tuning.