It's with a single, lazy click that I open the mod for Civility. That nation-builder game that has been taking up all my free time since I got hooked on to the addicting game-play less than a year ago. I don't actually know much about the mod. Other than the bits and pieces of information that has been scattered around Vapor's forums.
You know how it goes.
Somebody 'discovers' abandoned ware somewhere in the Deep Web, the darker side of the internet, and everyone makes a big fuss over it while we're waiting for the next big releases. But what makes this mod so special is that, outside the initial interest, everyone's been avoiding it.
There was a rumor that caught fire on Betaboards; suicides.
The mod induced suicides in whoever played it.
Nobody believed the first guy when he started talking about his close friend not responding to his messages. Or that female Letsplayer who talked about four out of the six people she'd been group-playing the mod with vanishing off-line. Her ranting on Chirper that the only reason she'd been spared was because she hadn't gotten to her turn yet.
But there wasn't any actual proof to her claims.
All of the video they'd pre-recorded was damaged somehow. When uploaded, the video was black and full of the distorted sounds of everyone who had playing but nothing about the game itself. And so the internet was content to ignore her and the rising number of online claims of friends downloading the game and vanishing off-line.
Everyone ignored and ignored until these off-line suicides made headlines. Yeah, they found the bodies. A few were genuine suicides. Or so the police reported. But there were far, far more unexplainable deaths. A good majority of the causes of death was by starvation. Now, I don't personally know any of the victims. I can't claim to have much experience with committing suicide.
But wouldn't starvation be one of the most longest, agonizingly ways to go?
If they lived alone, they were found in dark places. Under the bed. In the closet. Their faces sunken in. Their skin, leathery and bloodied by their own hands and teeth. The cops said, that in the victims' hysteria, they'd turned to eating themselves. Gnawing on their own bodies until their organs or some infection taking advantage of their weakened immune system, took them out.
This death by starvation didn't make sense in most cases. More often than not, the victims had food in their homes, money in the bank. A couple even lived over a restaurant, for goodness' sake. Not to mention, after autopsy, the effects of starvation was far more advanced than it should've been. These people had been off-line for weeks and yet their bodies showed months' work of degradation.
If they didn't live by themselves, they were found sealed in their rooms.
Without a peep or any signs of being home, their roommates or family members would assumed they were out... And if enough time had passed, filed a missing person report without realizing that their friend or family members was dying in the room next over. When interviewed, nearly all had the same story. They just didn't know or hadn't felt the need to search the victim's room until after they had passed. It was mind-boggling to say that in all of theses found suicides, there hadn't been at least one that was interrupted.
Then there were the weird suicides.
The ones that couldn't have been committed by just one person.
Not all of the details have been released to the public but nobody could deny the photo leaks of the first three weird suicides. The burnt remains of a New Yorker found in a sealed room. No traces of fire or flammable liquid around in the apartment. The severed limbs of somebody from Maryland, picked cleaned of all muscle while fat and flesh was arranged as a sort of offering. And of course, the third. The Californian who drowned to death in his bed, the water in his apartment long since turned off. He was moving out the next day.
The media, at the time, had been throwing around blood-boiling tag-lines like 'Internet Cult Goes Viral' and 'Video Games Cause Suicide: The Truth Revealed' until these little confusing facts came back from morticians across the nation.
And of course, the body count kept on rising.
Some folks on television tried to spin it as some sort of new age hallucination. The great sickness of the modern age; the loss of true values and mental fortitude that these millennials sorely lacked as they spent all of their free time online.
Imagine how everyone from the mother who ran a mommy blog to the co-worker with a Chatlog felt about that? There isn't enough cat pics to ease the flood of anger that came outpouring from every walk of life with a wi-fi connection. Needless to say, there was a lot of heated debate and anger from both sides.
Somewhere between that, I think everyone mainstream forgot about the mod that started it all.
I hear that some guys on Betaboards is trying to datamine it. Good luck to them. If I was a good enough programmer, I'd do the same and save myself the risk. But they've been losing volunteers ever since they announced their plans on getting to bottom of this mystery. Some other posters planned to do the same, recording their progress online and having safe-guards in place should they go off-line. Ha, that's funny. Nobody brings up suicide anymore on the forums. They use off-line instead. They whisper it around, “Don't go off-line. Stay on-line so we know where you are,” like a prayer or something.
And well, I'm curious. Will I be stricken to death over a video game? A game mod on top of that?
I can't see it.
The mod's loading onto my copy of Civility. There's still time for me to click out. It's not that I believe that I'd might die but that I'm still missing information. What causes the need for suicide? By just looking at the title screen, will I lose all urge to eat? Or is there something more?
I'm so curious. So very, very curious.
The mod finishes loading and my desktop's screen goes pitch black. I stare, tapping my fingers. Then some music starts playing. It's sweet and light like something out of a children's cartoon show. The blackness fades away to show me snapshots of bright and lush pixelated lands. The game's camera sweeps over forests, deserts and mountains, showing me more and all I could eventually have in the game world. Then over villages, towns, cities and great nations growing out of the soil.
As the cut scene continues, I notice that none of the inhabitants are humans. They're mythological creatures. Dragons. Gryphons. Minotaurs. And more. There's strangely enough, ponies though none of them are the realistic color.
The fun music ends abruptly to my surprise.
But not the cut scene.
It is with utter silence that snow and ice falls onto the game world.
I think then the cut scene will end but it continues, forcing me to watch images of the pixel creatures fight one another for resources. Murders breaking out against the white backdrop of snow. And then the deaths, the slow panning of those not quick enough to escape the ice. Freezing to death, their ice-covered limbs reaching for me, the viewer.
The game screen becomes white. Pure white.
Then words begin to appear, “You are the Sum of all.”
Below, the mod's name finally shows itself. The Endless Nation.
There isn't much of an UI once the title fades. The camera zooms in on a figure who's gotten lost from the others. A pony. Gray fur. Blue mane. She has no horn or wings and she shivers in the snow. I move my mouse, trying to figure out how to interact with the game world.
My cursor doesn't show up on the screen.
Instead, the snow falls harder. I try my mouse again and again. A storm forms over her area. The snow falls and falls.
A bar appears on the side of my screen. The numbers decreases.
The pony's breath grows slower and slower.
She's going to die.
What am I supposed to do?
