Toward an Understanding of Uses and Gratifications Theory and the Sense of Virtual Community on Knowledge Sharing in Online Game Communities

Abstract—Online games have been prevailing over the last decade and becoming a most popular leisure activity. Specifically, one of the recent and favorite types of online games is massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). MMORPGs are very prevalent in the adolescent, resulted from their characteristics, such as network connected, interactive, team-based type, and virtual challenge tasks. Antecedent studies have never thought of uses and gratification approach and the sense of virtual community at the same time when investigating the knowledge sharing in MMORPGs communities; however, the factors of uses and gratification theory will affect knowledge sharing through the sense of virtual community practically. This study is catering to this trend and attempts to build a comprehensive model for capturing the dynamic of knowledge sharing behaviors in MMORPGs communities.

Index Terms—Online games, sense of virtual community, uses and gratification theory, knowledge self-efficacy, knowledge sharing.

Yu-Wei Chuang is with the Department of Computer Science and Information Management, Providence University, No. 200, Sec. 7, Taiwan Boulevard, Taichung City, 43301, Taiwan (e-mail: ywchuang@gmail.com, ywchuang@pu.edu.tw).

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Cite: Yu-Wei Chuang, "Toward an Understanding of Uses and Gratifications Theory and the Sense of Virtual Community on Knowledge Sharing in Online Game Communities," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 472-476, 2015.