Research On The Influence Of E-sports Players On The Interpersonal Communication Of Teenage Gamers

In today’s society,e-sports,as a major field of pan-entertainment,is already as popular as the traditional entertainment industry.In the past two years,e-sports has got a blowout development,which has aroused the attention of the whole society.The e-sports industry has been recognized by more and more people,and related researches in academia are increasing day by day.However,as opinion leaders in the online game world,there are few researches on e-sports players.Importantly,the media image presented by e-sports players is bound to have a demonstration effect on the public,especially the teenagers who love online games and e-sports.Therefore,it is of vital theoretical and practical significance to explore how e-sports players influence the interpersonal communication of teenage gamers.First of all,this research comprehensively collates and summarizes the previous research results on e-sports players,parasocial relationship and interpersonal communication of teenage gamers.On this basis,a research model of e-sports players’ own attributes,content attributes,parasocial relationship and interpersonal communication of teenage gamers has been constructed.This research selects e-sports players’ own attributes(including three dimensions of role attractiveness,role expertise and role similarity)and content attributes(including two dimensions of content interest and content relevance)as antecedent variables to explore the influencing factors of teenage gamers’ perceived parasocial relationship with e-sports players,and the influence mechanism of e-sports players on the interpersonal communication of teenage gamers.Considering that teenage gamers’ preference for e-sports players is a one-way intimate relationship,we introduced parasocial relationship as a mediating variable to verify whether it plays a mediating role in the process of e-sports players’ influence on the interpersonal communication of teenage gamers.Secondly,this research drew on the mature scales of previous studies,and distributed the questionnaires through offline and online channels.A total of 324 valid samples are collected.This research used EXCEL,SPSS22.0 and AMOS23.0 to conduct empirical analysis on the reliability and validity of questionnaire data,correlation analysis,structural equation model and Bootstrap mediation effect test,and then combine with the content of in-depth interviews with 7 teenage gamers.Finally,this research came to the following conclusions:(1)E-sports players’ own attributes and content attributes have a positive and significant impact on teenage gamers’ perception of parasocial relationship on e-sports players.(2)The parasocial relationship with e-sports players has a positive and significant impact on the interpersonal communication of teenage gamers.(3)The parasocial relationship plays a completely intermediary role in the influence of e-sports players’ role attractiveness,role similarity and content relevance on teenage gamers’ interpersonal communication.Based on the above research conclusions,this research puts forward relevant suggestions on how to guide teenage gamers for e-sports players and how to correctly understand the parasocial relationship with e-sports players for teenage gamers,and further illustrate the deficiencies of this research and future research direction.Finally,the innovations of this research mainly include the following two aspects:(1)Selecting e-sports players as the research object broadens the application fields of quasi-social relationship theory.(2)This study proposed that parasocial relations play an intermediary role in the influence of e-sports players on the interpersonal communication of teenage gamers,adding new content to the research on interpersonal communication of teenagers.