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FROM THE SILENT HOUSE MEME TO THE BLUE WHALE-GAME: THE STORYWORLDS TRANSFORMATION
Abstract
The Blue Whale contest is believed to be ? sinister teenage ARG based on a series of tasks given by the administrators of social network VKontakte (VK) groups over the course of 50 days. The overall goal is committing suicide, on the 50th day. It is assumed that by May of 2016 the game has been a reason of more than 130 juveniles' suicides in Russia. While the allegation on 130 deaths caused by game originally mentioned in the Novaya Gazeta was not confirmed officially, the prototypes of the game apparently existed on VK before. They included interactive quests, ARGs, the games with augmented reality based on the myth of Deep Web and its map created within the Russian net-stalking communities. The myth describes the abysmal cyber world filled with "creepy" contents also known as deathly files. By early 2017 the rumors about the Blue Whale suicide game moved beyond the national social networks and Russian-language imageboard websites and induced a commotion in the national press and reached the media of some neighboring states in the former USSR and even farther. During transition from the social media to the Russian mainstream media and further to the foreign media the story about the Deep Web and its storyworld were substantially transformed into the story of the Blue Whale contest. The aim of this paper is to identify the peculiarities of an elaboration of an ARG's storyworld during transition from social media to mainstream media. For this purpose, we focused on an analysis how the storyworld and narrative were affected through the transition from Deep Web myth to the Blue Whale contest narration and the mainstream media interferences from chronological perspective.
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