利用玩家設計介面探討玩家在線上遊戲中加入與離開公會的原因

Abstract

鉅量多人線上遊戲的市場持續成長，如何將玩家留住在遊戲世界裡，成為遊戲設計公司最感興趣的議題之一。近年來許多研究者針對線上遊戲裡的玩家和公會，做了很多的研究，提出許多不同的玩家分類和公會分類，以及不少探討玩家互動和公會轉型的研究結果。但是卻普遍缺乏觀察玩家與公會之間的互動，並且忽略了線上遊戲一個很重要的特色，那就是在遊戲世界裡，玩家會同時擁有許多遊戲角色，單單觀察遊戲角色不足以了解玩家。此外，以往採用問券或訪談的研究方法，無法達到全盤且長期的資料收集，難以研究玩家和公會在動態上的變化。 故本論文著眼在玩家與公會間的互動方式，探討玩家挑選公會時所考量的因素為何，以及玩家與公會之間風格的互相影響。此外還引入分身的概念，指出玩家在遊戲世界擁有分身，即同時擁有許多遊戲角色，必須觀察這些分身，才能真正的了解玩家。並且本論文採用一套玩家設計介面─一種遊戲的使用者介面，由遊戲設計公司所提供，讓使用者能自行開發設計─用以從遊戲中直接取得完整的資料，同時也支援做長期觀察，方便觀察到遊戲世界裡的動態變化。本論文最大的貢獻在於提出玩家挑選公會時所考量的因素，以及提出一套分身演算法來尋找玩家所擁有的分身。

Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) market continues to grow. How to keep players staying in game world becomes one of the most interesting topics for game design companies. In recent years many researchers interested in online game players and player created guilds have done a lot of researches about player and guild classification, player interactions, and guild constructions. However, they neglected one very important feature that is an account owned by one player can create multiple characters. It is insufficient to understand the player by simply observing characters. In addition, using interview or questionnaire approaches to investigate online game world cannot obtain an overall and long-term data collection. Therefore, using these conventional approaches is difficult to study the dynamic changes between players and guilds.

This paper is focus on the interaction between player and the guilds. I put my emphases on study which factors can influence the reason why players joined or left their guilds by observing the mutual relation between player’s and guild’s style. Furthermore I will introduce the concept of mirror identity that the player has two or more characters in the same game world. We must observe these mirror identities, and then we can truly understand how player plays and arrange his/her time in game. In this paper, I use a player-designed user interface - a game user interface which is provided by the game design company, so that users can design their own development - direct access complete information from the game, at the same time it also supports long-term observe, to facilitate observes the dynamic change in the game world. The principal contribution of this paper suggests which factors that players considered and selected by the guilds, and proposed an algorithm to find players’ mirror identity.