Over the years, reasons for playing digital games have been studied from a variety of perspectives. A systematic, theoretically and empirically grounded conceptual framework which takes into account the specificity of gaming as a contextualized social, rule‐based, narrative, and systemic practice has hitherto been lacking however. This paper proposes such a framework based on social cognitive theory and elaborated on by means of 37 in‐depth interviews. Understanding digital play is conceptualized as a reciprocal system of play behavior, individual factors, and environmental aspects. This approach offers a flexible framework for understanding determinants of playing games in a variety of contexts while taking into account the specific characteristics of the medium.