More Than a Game: Friendship Relational Maintenance and Attitudes Toward Xbox LIVE Communication

Guided by media multiplexity theory, this manuscript reports an empirical investigation of relational maintenance and closeness between friends who communicate via Microsoft's Xbox LIVE service. Attitudes toward self-disclosure and social connection across Xbox LIVE interacted to predict Xbox LIVE relational maintenance, with social connection attitude directly predicting offline communication frequency. Both Xbox LIVE relational maintenance and offline communication frequency interacted to predict relational closeness, with high closeness in the presence of either frequent Xbox LIVE maintenance or offline communication. These results suggest extending media multiplexity theory to account for individual attitudes toward new and existing media.