First Monday, Volume 20, Number 7 - 6 July 2015 Online pranking videos are common online and popular among middle-school students, teens and young adults. When we examined 200 YouTube examples of the Scary Maze Game prank, we explored the relationship between perpetrator, victim and witness, finding that while American children under age 12 were commonly featured as victims in Scary Maze Game prank videos, only rarely were German children represented as victims. U.S. videos also lingered on the pain of prank victims, even looping the emotional response of the victim to create an instant replay effect and using post-production techniques, including editing, music and title credits. As an expression of the schadenfreude that people experience when both enacting and viewing bad pranks, online pranking is a dimension of the dark side of participatory culture. Contents Introduction Video pranking as transgression Pranking, identity, culture and power Harmful or harmless? Research process How pranking victims are depicted Editing techniques, popularity and YouTube viewer response Conclusion: The pleasures of the prank Introduction Humans have been playing pranks on each other since prehistoric times, when we first learned how to manipulate social power through laughter at the expense of others. Pranking is deeply inflected by cultural norms as well as norms established through broadcast television, radio and the Internet. But when cultural and professional norms collide, pranks can lead to disaster. In December 2012, there was widespread media attention of the case of Jacintha Saldanha, a British nurse who committed suicide after being tricked by a prank phone call performed on the radio by Australian disc jockeys who impersonated the King and Queen of England and led the nurse to reveal medical information about a member of the British royal family. This news event highlighted important cultural differences in people’s emotional responses to pranks as well as the amplifying power of the mass media as public witness. Online pranking videos are popular all around the world. Often timed to coincide with April Fools’ Day, pranking videos from Russia, France and many other countries can be highly amusing or nearly incomprehensible (Mallenbaum and Hurwitz, 2013). The widespread appeal of pranks is undeniable, as Jesse Wellens and his girlfriend Jeana discovered when they created Prank vs. Prank ( https://www.youtube.com/user/prankvsprank), a YouTube channel series of reality pranking videos, which have attracted over 700 million views and five million subscribers. One important early online prank video began around 2002 when interactive flash videos known as “scare pranks” or “scary mazes” began to emerge across the Internet. Before the advent of social media, scary maze Web sites were shared via e-mail postings, chat rooms or instant messages. Upon clicking a link, the viewer is presented with a puzzle game that requires a high level of concentration, only to be disrupted by an ear-piercing scream and ghastly photos from horror films. Figure 1 provides examples of images from a few scary maze game videos. Some of Hobbs http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/5981/4699 1 von 12 28.04.16 08:46