基于电子竞技活动的中国城市网络空间结构与影响因素分析

The rapid rise of digital economies has generated complex impacts on the spatial organization of economic activities, which has raised new issues for the research of urban networks. Taking the e-sports industry as a case, this paper investigates the spatial structure and impacting factors of China's urban network under the influence of the digital economy. It first collects information on the participating teams in the four major e-sports events in China from 2013 to 2022 to reveal the spatial structure of the e-sports-based urban network using the method of social network analysis. After that, the paper adopts the method of ridge regression analysis to explore the main factors affecting the geographic pattern of this inter-city network. The results of this study show that: 1) China's e-sports-based urban network generally shows a trend of continuous expansion, forming a "core-periphery" structure with Shanghai as the primary center and Beijing as the sub-center. The spatial diffusion of the urban network is relatively limited, whereas the proportion of inter-city connections is gradually increasing, which reflects the dual impacts of the digital economy on the organization of urban networks. 2) The connecting network between the cities where the events are held and the cities where the teams are located shows a relatively obvious hierarchical structure, while the connecting network between the cities where the teams are located shows a more evident trend of diffusion, indicating the divergent locational patterns of e-sports events and e-sports teams. 3) Local policies and urbanization economies are the main factors that shape the spatial structure of urban networks, while the impacts of localization economies and urban amenities are not obvious, reflecting the specialities of the e-sports industry in terms of its developmental stage and mechanism of talent generation in China. The results of this paper offer a new perspective for understanding the geographical reconstruction of urban networks in the context of digital economy, and also provide a reference for the formulation of urban digital economy development policies.