Identity Of E-sports Team Fans From The Perspective Of Interactive Ritual Chains ——An Investigation Of The Wolf’s Weibo Chaohua Community

In recent years,e-ports have grown rapidly and gained great popularity.With e-sports being officially established as a sport by the General Administration of Sport of China,e-sports is booming.In 2021,e-sports were also established as an official competition item in the Asian Games,and will soon enter the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou.In the entire e-sports industry chain,e-sports events serve as the core of the industry.The huge e-sports fans have become an important force in Chinese society.Although they have different social identities and statuses,they share common characteristics.That they have a common interest in e-sports and support an e-sports team,and gradually form a collective consciousness among the spectator group,which can be called e-sports team fans.As a newly emerged field,there is still little research on e-sports fan groups.This study hopes to provide directions and ideas for subsequent research.On the one hand,it expands the theoretical category of fan community research,and on the other hand,it is important for the operation of virtual communities and the control of public opinion in reality.This study uses Collins’ interactive ritual chain theory as a framework to study the identity of e-sports team fans groups.Through observational exploration of the virtual communities in which the Wolf s fans are located,the study uses participant observation and in-depth interviews to study the interactive behaviors and interaction characteristics of fans and the identity construction in the process.This study mainly selects the Weibo Chaohua community as the main observation community,which is the main forum for online discussion and communication among e-sports fans.It is also a place where fans gather around common interests and concerns to discuss e-sports events.This study analyzes tweets and interviews as the unit of analysis by crawling text content and basic user information in the Weibo Chaohua community as research samples.The author has selected fan members from the observation community who speak frequently and often interact with other fans as interviewees to explore the intrinsic motivation of their relevant interaction behaviors.It was found that fans achieved identity formation,construction,and establishment in the process of conducting interactive rituals.Among them,the components of the interactive rituals lead to the formation and construction of identity,and the results of the interactive rituals lead to the establishment of identity.The study also found that the current e-sports fans have problems such as de-individuation and large contrast between the virtual community and reality.Therefore,the study makes suggestions for the development of e-sports fans in three aspects,including fan behavior norms,media guidance,and practitioner guidelines.Finally,this thesis reflects on and summarizes the limitations of this study in the hope that it will provide a reference for subsequent studies.