ABSTRACT
With the arrival of digitalization, now accompanied by gamification and the existence of virtual reputations, video games have become a sign of progress for some and the precursor of inequalities for others. For much of the media at the end of the 1990s, video games were synonymous with deviancy, or even crime and pathology. These prejudices were fed by sensationalism in the media. Far from being something meaningless among typical immature adolescents, “viral challenges” can be understood as serious games, as initiation rituals within the environments and logics of augmented reality. Viral challenges are brief actions videoed and placed on generalist social networks, principally YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and more recently Tik Tok, which through “tell the uploader if viewer like it” and “see if the viewer dare” seek recognition and popularity for their participants. Some experts think that social challenges have such wide acceptance among adolescents because puberty is a stage in which they seek sensations of “feeling good”.
