Prosumer e star dei videogiochi

This Italian-language essay by Giuseppe Frazzetto, published in the inaugural 2012 issue of a games journal, examines the concept of the "prosumer" (a blend of producer and consumer) in relation to video games. It argues that while early scholarly enthusiasm about user-generated content, associated with Alvin Toffler and later Henry Jenkins, has cooled, the prosumer remains central to the Web 2.0 landscape. The author surveys debates over whether users generating content on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia constitute exploited labor, and whether their output redeems or merely reprocesses industrial culture. He also engages the "long tail" theory of market fragmentation, where digital production enables extremely small runs of cultural goods.

The core analytical move concerns video games specifically. Frazzetto contends that unlike fan fiction or amateur photography, the prosumer in gaming is a performer, since the medium is a narrative that becomes spectacle through the player's active participation. He notes that the gaming community is marked by a distinctive vanity culture ("epeen"), and that the celebrated figure of a player such as Kungen, a famous character on World of Warcraft servers, differs fundamentally from a sports champion. Players are not separated from their idols by an insurmountable distance, because in principle any performer can achieve the same status as a legendary player.

The essay is primarily conceptual and discursive rather than empirical. It draws on no surveys, sample sizes, or quantitative datasets, and its scope is theoretical, centred on Western online communities and a few illustrative cases such as World of Warcraft guilds, Star Wars fan fiction, and machinima. Its conclusions are interpretive: the player-performer transforms the prosumer model into a distinct form of creative and social participation that merits separate analysis from artistic or literary production.