Examining Virtual Character Creations and Individuals’ Offline Lives for Gaming in Players of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games

• Main Authors: Yu-En Lin, 林鈺恩
• Other Authors: Jian-Bang Deng
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/41126261283487303842

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 未來學研究所碩士班 === 104 === “Online game” is not an unfamiliar noun to many people and has been the research topic for many years. However, the “online game” and its players have changed profoundly in recent years. The author of this essay, who is also the player of "MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game)”, found that there is a gap between the online roles of game plyers and their offline lives. The framework of this research was based mainly on the “ theater theory” by American sociologist Erving Goffman. Through qualitative interviews with online game players, this research aimed to find out how players choose their online gender, how they dealt with the gap between online role-playing and real-life experiences, and how they solved the conflicts arising during the process of game playing with other players. To sum up, the research found out that "anonymity on the Internet" has gradually lost its protection for the players’ identity during the process of online-role gender selection; hence, players didn’t show the intention to keep their gender secret. Instead, players tended to choose the online gender roles from their aesthetic viewpoints as well as from their past experiences in playing online games. In addition, this research found that female players by choosing male gender roles (Type III players) behaved more likely close to the so-called “good” game players with the purpose of fulfilling social expectations. This finding was against past studies which claimed that "the online-game world allows players to be the true-self and enables them to unload their masks on the backstage". Furthermore, this study also found that having MMORPG experience could actually benefit players’ real lives in many ways, such as stabilizing their emotions etc.. Finally, in order to avoid indulging in the world of online-game, players have to increase their awareness and recognition of their own responsibilities in the daily lives and make a clear difference between their real lives and the online roles.