Division Of The Self:Research On Adolescent Role-Playing Game Players'Online And Offline Self-Identities

Self-identity is closely related to ego and personality development.As an essential step in the process of human beings' socialization,self-identity endows individuals with basic sense of security,self-esteem self-confidence and sense of purpose.And adolescence is a critical period of self-identity formation.Online role-playing games(ORPG)has become a popular way of digital living while its impact on shaping adolescent players' self-identities has been widely disputed.Shifting in reality and the virtual world,adolescent players have to convert between different roles accordingly.What factors would affect their online and offline self-identities?Are online and offline identities unified or divided exactly?To answer these questions,this study establishes a hypothesis model about adolescent ORPG players online and offline self-identities,based on the self-identity state model,and discusses influence factors and relationship between the two identities.Firstly,this study determines dimensions of ORPG motivation and behavior through literature review.Game motivation is subdivided into achievement.immersion and social motivation,and game behavior includes involvement and adhesiveness.Meanwhile,from the perspective of para-social interaction theory,this study introduces the variable of character attachment(CA)to measure the degree of emotional connection between players and roles they plays in order to enrich and supplement research of para-social interaction theory in online games.One contribution of this study is that it identifies players' online and offline identities.Based on literature and in-depth interviews,this study develops an ORPG players' online identity scale,which proves to have good reliability and validity by post-data.Thus the research model is constructed,consisting of game motivation,game behavior,CA,online and offline self-identities.On this basis,this study obtains 895 valid samples through questionnaires and uses SPSS to analyze data and validate hypotheses and model.The results show that:(1)immersion,achievement and social motivations have significantly positive impact on players' involvement,adhesiveness as well as CA,while both involvement and adhesiveness have no significant correlation with CA;(2)three kinds of motivations,involvement and CA all have positive impact on online self-identity,with CA having the highest extent of impact;(3)achievement motivation,CA and age have significantly negative correlation with offline self-identity,while playing age has positive impact on offline self-identity.The results indicate that variables including online self-identity,game behavior,immmersion and social motivations have no significant impact on offline-self-identity.There appears to be a division between online and offline self-identities.Therefore,this study suggests that both online and offline self-identities are important parts of integral self.Although role-playing games help players develop online self-identity,it has little significance for the development of offline self-identity in real life.Para-social interaction theory should be amended in the context of ORPG because the online self-identity developed by players cannot be converted into significant extension and effective remedy to offline self-identity.What's worse is that the higher degree of CA and achievement motivation,the lower degree of offline self-identity.Construction of adolescents' offline self-identity and resolution of identity crisis still need to be conducted in real life.