A Deadly Game User Experience: TheCase of #BlueWhaleChallenge

• Main Authors: Ozturkcan, Selcen, Ozdinc, Mesut
• Other Authors: Bostan, Barbaros
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Springer, Cham 2020
• Subjects: Indian; Blue whale
• Online Access: https://research.abo.fi/en/publications/358ecd5d-bbd5-461e-b567-9b35709627a4; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37643-7_18; http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-030-37643-7_18

Lately, the Blue Whale Challenge, which is also known as the Blue Whale Game, received public attention via the countless news about teenagers all around the world harming themselves as they engage with the so-called game (Balhara et al., Asia Pac Psychiatry, 10(3), 2018; Sousa et al., Int J Soc Psychiatry, 63(8), 796–797, 2017). Though referred to as a game, it involves a series of self-harming tasks (Narayan etal., Indian J Psychiatry, 61(1), 2019), which spread via social media for completion in 50 days.The final task reported as to commit suicide (Khattar et al., White or Blue, the Whale gets its Vengeance: A Social Media Analysis of the Blue Whale Challenge, 2018). The victims of the Blue Whale Challenge, being mostly teenagers and young adults, the significant concern rising from the families calls for the topic to treated as that of a severe public health issue (Kumar et al., Psychobiological determinants of ‘Blue Whale Suicide Challenge’ victimization: A proposition for the agency mediated mental health risk in new media age, 2017). To this date, the blue whale challenge is perhaps the only game that demands its user to end his/her life for completing the game (Mukhra et al., Sci Eng Ethics, 25(1), 285–291, 2019). This chapter aims to explore the collection of news that involved the often-deadly game user experiences. Contributions are in several folds starting from the game user experience field to the gamer psychology as well as public health policy development and text analysis of broadcasted news surrounding a critical public concern.