Co-opting Transmedia Consumers: User Content as Entertainment or ‘Free Labour’? The Cases of S.T.A.L.K.E.R . and Metro 2033

Abstract

I wish to thank the team of the ‘New Media in New Europe-Asia’ project—Natasha Rulyova, Jeremy Morris and Vlad Strukov—for inviting discussion on new media in the region and Jeremy Morris for his support and comments. The expansion of new media and the advent of Web 2.0 has resulted in dramatic changes in consumers’ roles, turning them into ‘prosumers’: co-participants in cultural production. This essay considers the new situation through analysis of transmedia phenomena produced simultaneously by companies and consumers’ activity. The analysis of two Russian transmedial projects: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro 2033, reveals a paradox in this phenomenon testifying to the mass expansion and boom in creative practices (rooted, to a great extent, in Soviet cultural traditions) and to their total commodification at the same time.

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