Adolescents feel confusion all the time on the way to become mature adults. In ancient time, children were guided to go through adulthood ceremony to ease safely the unsettled and risky mind at the adolescent stage. It is a pity that Internet Café and on-line games nowadays becomes a battlefield for young people to fight with their confusion and conflicts in mind hoping for gaining inside happiness and calm. However, on-line games are not products designed to help adolescent inner growth but commercials, which aim to profit. Internet Café, though, is not an ideal place to develop one¡¦s identity, offers a possibility of exciting exploring journey. Nevertheless, in a cement jungle, limited space drives children to go into a virtual fascinating playground to discover ¡§Who am I?¡¨
Campbell stated the theme of ancient myth to present contemporary phenomenon. The myth claims that children are born to be heroes. Heroes search for inner growth, self-identity and conquer challenges in fate of their own. No one can escape from the risky life journey (transformation from adolescent to adult), even though we do not expect it, it comes to us eventually. It is an innate thirst to success in perilous life voyage.
This research adapted qualitative in-depth interviews with forty-four young people in eleven Internet Cafés in Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County, exploring twelve individual cases in profound reflection of their lives, which the whole observation and interviews have been lasted eight months long (September, 2005-April, 2006) and still, some of them kept intensive contact with me.
Most heroes in the cases stepped into Dark Forest-Internet Cafés since grade 3 or 4 and had undergone 4 to 5-year attempt and gradual transformation in mind in addition to the helping hand from Goddess of Happiness (significant others), heroes will come back to real world along with the grace (self-awareness) of the trial in Dark Forest. They will live freely and happily and become masters of two worlds, the Forest and outside world. Heroes who do not break through the spell of Dark Forest would still wait for the guidance of Goddess of Happiness or worse, they would be trapped in jails and dangers and lost contacts with outside world.
The research discovers that the main cause of attaching to on-line games comes from school; the secondary cause comes from family. On one hand, the harvest of young people in on-line games contains positive compensation on missing adulthood ceremony passing smoothly rebellious and confusing stage of life journey. On the other hand, the negative influence would be suffering from bad health attributing to staying up all night; bad school performance, unsatisfactory interaction with teachers and parents and much more, some of the young people can not even finish junior high schooling.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0731106-212419 |
| Date | 31 July 2006 |
| Creators | Fang, Yu-Shen |
| Contributors | Hsin-Hui Lin, Feng-Yang Kuo, Hsing-Tzu Lin |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0731106-212419 |
| Rights | withheld, Copyright information available at source archive |
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