A Deadly Game User Experience : The Case of #BlueWhaleChallenge

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, Bhargava, Pakhre, & Bhati, 2018; Sousa, Filho, Cavalcanti, Santos, & Neto, 2017). Though referred to as a game, it involves a series of self-harming tasks (Narayan, Das, Das, & Bhandari, 2019), which spread via social media for completion in 50 days (Yılmaz & Candan, 2018). The final task reported as to commit suicide (Khattar, Dabas, Gupta, Chopra, & Kumaraguru, 2018; Volkova, Kadyrova, Rastorgueva, & Algavi, 2017). The victims of the 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., 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, Baryah, Krishan, & Kanchan, 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 broad-casted news surrounding a critical public concern