| Summary: | 碩士 === 清雲科技大學 === 經營管理研究所 === 100 === Compared with relevant studies that focused on user behaviors, psychological needs, and laws regulating cybercrimes in the past, this study applies the social networking concept and attempts to identify the network relationship between online gamers. As online games constitute virtual communities, this study adopts the Social Network Analysis (SNA) to design five questions about online games in order to explore the degree centrality, betweenness centrality and network density with regard to the characteristics of virtual communities. As shown by the result of degree centrality, the scale of network relationship and social networking between players are significantly bolstered when servers merge. As a result, server mergers not only tighten the relationship between gamers, but also keep the degree centrality above a certain level. However, from the perspective of social networking, there might also be a link between the number of players and the degree centrality, as the group centrality shows a fairly consistent trend with the network density when the group centrality and the network density are put together for comparison, with the distribution of the number of players being the common factor that influences both the degree centrality and network density. Since game manufacturers usually do not consider the network relationships between players when implementing server mergers, the phenomenon that the degree centrality of players becomes so much lower after servers merge ensues. Meanwhile, the phenomenon that the betweenness centrality is low both before and after servers merge might also be another important factor that influence the management of online game business. After observation and analysis on the data before and after servers merge, this study concludes that while some players with higher degree centrality may have pull themselves out of the online games, some others who remain insusceptible to the mergers are more likely to be important central figures in the community groups or players with higher social status. Meanwhile, if game manufacturers are willing to focus on the interactions between and opinions from those players, the long-term management of online games will certainly be improved.
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