Interactivity, entertainment, and the new authenticity: Key factors influencing user participation in digital rural script games

The development of digital technology has brought new possibilities for cultural inheritance, especially in combining traditional cultural elements with modern digital narratives. Digital rural script games, as an emerging form of cultural tourism integration, have opened new pathways for the innovative dissemination of rural culture by combining traditional rural culture with digital narratives. However, the key factors influencing users’ participation intentions and their mechanisms have not been fully studied. Based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) theoretical framework, this study constructs a theoretical model integrating environmental stimuli (interactivity, entertainment, and authenticity) and organismic responses (immersion experience and emotional attachment) to explore the influence mechanism of users’ participation intention in digital rural script games. Through a questionnaire survey of 415 users, it was found that interactivity and entertainment have significant positive effects on both immersion experience and emotional attachment, while authenticity affects users’ participation intention only through emotional attachment rather than immersion experience. This finding challenges the widely accepted authenticity-experience relationship in traditional cultural tourism research, providing a new perspective for redefining the concept of “authenticity” in the digital age. The results suggest that in digital cultural experiences, designers need to go beyond simple physical authenticity restoration and focus more on how to use technological means to stimulate users’ understanding and emotional identification with cultural connotations.