Everyone who played Epic Mafia knew Eris, or at least knew of him. In real life, he was a 32-year-old computer programmer, who lived alone with his border collie in upstate New York, but in the tight-knit online gaming community of Epic Mafia, he was a celebrity, the impresario of the site’s many forums, constantly flirting, philosophising, gossiping. In the seven years since the site had launched, he had formed many intense friendships with people he had never met, but who had come to depend on him. Eris had the gift of easy intimacy. He asked real questions. He wanted to know you. And best of all, he was always right there when you needed him: online.
“Many people will probably wonder why I’ve decided to do this,” read the beginning of the suicide note that Eris had scheduled to appear on his Tumblr on 27 April 2015, two days after his death. “I was sexually abused as a child … and have dealt with the consequences of that my entire life. Imagine going through life with an ever-present shadow hanging over you, worrying if you too might be like the people who destroyed your childhood and life.”
Eris’s suicide note was unusual for a number of reasons. For one thing, it included an apology to the many players he had abused online over the years. Eris was one of Epic Mafia’s most popular members, but he was also its most notorious troll. Most of his transgressions were juvenile. He liked to post innocent-looking links that led to a photo of a My Little Pony doll he had jerked off on. He could also be malicious and vengeful. On the Epic Mafia forum, Eris once responded to a post by an African-American player by posting a picture of King Kong. In the heat of an online feud, he had been known to hack into people’s accounts and delete them. And he routinely doxxed other players, using his programming skills to reveal details about their offline identities – their weight, their age, even photographs of their home.
His defenders insisted that Eris’s activities were innocuous. Most of these revelations never left the forums; they were more a token of his affection – he cared enough to dox you! – than the kind of thing that would damage someone’s reputation. But others felt he went too far. After a prolonged argument with one of Epic Mafia’s game moderators and another player, Eris submitted their Skype addresses to AddMeContacts.com, so they would be flooded with contact requests from strangers. The other player was a 17-year-old girl, which stoked accusations of sexual harassment. Eris claimed it was a harmless prank, and just retaliation for the pair logging in to one of his websites without permission, but many players were not sure who to believe; in the world of Epic Mafia, lying was not just part of the game, lying was the game.
Compared with the web’s most popular multiplayer games, Epic Mafia is not all that epic. Although 400,000 accounts have been registered, the number of players rarely rises above 4,000 per day. The site’s founder, a software engineer who goes by the handle Lucid, holds a full-time job at Uber and describes Epic Mafia as only “slightly profitable”. (He did not want to disclose numbers.) Yet it is based on what is probably the world’s most popular modern parlour game. In its 30-year history, the original Mafia game has spawned a television series in Latvia, a chain of bricks-and-mortar gaming clubs in China and a world championship event in Las Vegas.
Mafia was created in a Soviet dormitory in 1987, by a psychology graduate student named Dimma Davidoff, but today it (and its sci-fi spin-off, Werewolf) is a popular pastime with the entrepreneurial set – particularly those involved in tech and venture capital in Silicon Valley. (“It has infected almost every significant tech event around the world,” said a 2010 article in Wired. “During lunch at San Francisco’s giant Game Developers Conference, or in the bars after closing at ETech, games of Werewolf break out spontaneously.”)
There are no boards, dice, or cute moulded pieces in Mafia, only one player’s word against another’s. The parlour game begins with people being randomly divided into two groups: Mafia and Innocent Civilians. The Mafia are known to one another; theirs is the power of knowledge. Civilians are ignorant of anyone else’s role, but hold a large majority; theirs is the power of numbers. An omniscient moderator leads players through the two alternating phases of the game – day and night. During the “day”, the players interrogate one another until a majority decides upon a Mafia suspect to send to the gallows. At “night”, the civilians must close their eyes, while the Mafia reveal themselves to each other by remaining “awake” and silently indicate to the moderator who they wish to “kill”. A player’s true identity is only revealed upon their death, and the game continues until the civilians succeed in rooting out all of the mafiosi, or the mafia outnumber the remaining civilians.
As the death toll rises, so too does the feeling of paranoia and desperation. This is by design. When Davidoff was growing up, most Soviet games were inspired by the “us v them” dynamic of the cold war, but Davidoff wanted Mafia to serve as a metaphor for the darkest years of the communist regime, when anyone – your boss, your neighbour, your lover – could be an informant. The real enemy, he believed, was to be found within. Change the word “Mafia” to “KGB” and you have life under Stalin, writ small.
It is hard to imagine an immersive experience like Mafia, with its elements of improv theatre and courtroom drama, working online. To lovers of the live game, Epic Mafia might seem like a letdown. Unlike the high-powered tech whizzes who play the parlour game, the people who play Epic Mafia tend to be high-school and college students looking for a good way to waste time. Players are represented by raisin-sized avatars bearing names like Hipsteresque and MrStealYoGrill. Deathblows are delivered or averted via a live-message interface. The aesthetic is aggressively Web 1.0; it might best be described as “Craigslisty”.
In 2010, two years after the game launched, Lucid introduced a webcam feature so that online players could finally experience the face-offs of the live game, where the slightest twitch or misplaced glance can give players away. He was sure it would be a huge hit, but the webcam went largely ignored. (It has since been disabled.) For many Epic Mafia players, anonymity was a plus. Your body could no longer betray you; Mafia was distilled to its purest form.
Anonymity also heightened the game’s already paranoid atmosphere. It became easy to cheat: players could form secret alliances, revealing their roles by sending one another off-site messages. And it opened the doors to the usual internet rogues – trolls and doxxers, catfishers and con artists. For the 50 or so most hardcore players, who spent hours every day on the site, outing the personal identities of these camouflaged miscreants became a sport. They exposed frauds such as a man who was pretending to be a teenage girl, and a woman who claimed to have suffered a traumatic brain injury but offered multiple explanations (car crash, electrical surge, illness) on different forums. Soon, however, Epic Mafia’s vigilantes began to cast their net wider. The focus shifted from people telling potentially dangerous lies to those telling commonplace ones, like the player ostracised for claiming to be from Australia when she in fact lived in Florida. (They traced her IP address.) Eventually, the slightest misstep – being friends with the wrong player, leaving a comment that was deemed annoying – could land one on the hitlist. Life on the site was becoming more like the game itself: no one’s identity was trusted, and no one’s identity was safe.
I experienced this mistrust firsthand when I first contacted a player who, having been doxxed, asked to be identified only as Home Slice. “Is there any way you can provide incontrovertible proof that you’re you?” wrote Home Slice in response to my interview request. “I’d ask you to craft a specific tweet in real time or take a picture of yourself holding up a piece of paper with something written on it.”
But rather than scare players away from the site, Epic Mafia’s peculiar culture only made it more addictive. “This sounds absurd and melodramatic, but I think there is some truth to the concept that EM becomes a second reality. (Clearly, for some people, it turns into a surrogate social life.) Compound this with the reasons for which serious players presumably take interest in Mafia – deception, detective work, etc – and the traits you need to be good at the game – charisma, cunning, analytic horsepower – and you get someone with a proclivity for political/interpersonal drama.”
“Eg,” Home Slice wrote, “Eris.”
Eris had long been the most powerful mischief-maker in Epic Mafia. He was a computer prodigy. He began programming at age 11 on a hand-me-down Commodore 64, an early home computer popular in the 1980s. By age 16, he had taught himself half a dozen programming languages. Within the world of Epic Mafia, Eris quickly became known as a programming ninja and the “mods” would sometimes ask him to help them identify cheats. He created a discrete website which provided them with access to more detailed user data, allowing moderators to track all of the accounts a player might have created under alternative names.
But Eris – who took his username from the Greek goddess of chaos, strife and discord – also used his skills to punk the mods, exploiting the site’s many security loopholes. He turned players against moderators he didn’t like. He boobytrapped emails with hidden scripts that caused moderators to inadvertently unban penalised players. He hijacked mod accounts and reversed the results of games. And throughout all this, he continued to post private information about players’ personal identities. “He kept enough lies circulating that we could never really be sure what was true and what wasn’t,” one former site administrator said of Eris. “To him it was all a big game.”
In late autumn 2014, Eris was permanently banned from the site for locking all the mods out of the site’s forums for a day. The game’s forums were more than just a place to socialise – they were the main venue for moderators and players to communicate, a kind of open-air court where grievances were aired and adjudicated. Many of the mods still admired Eris, but now he had crossed the line from nuisance to outright menace.
Of course, at the time they had no way of knowing the impact such a ban would have on him. Six months later, Eris was gone.
Even in death, Eris could not quite let go of his preoccupation with the game, its players and their real-life identities. His note included the following coda:
“I’ve left all my skype logs and other personal data, after expunging the truly innocent, to a third party I can trust … I’m afraid a great many of you will be ruined should the things I knew see the light of day, especially several of you who are doing things that I feel the authorities would be deeply interested in, you know who you are.”
“Protecting your secrets is no longer my problem,” the note continued, “Whether or not your sins come to light is hardly relevant to me at this point, but I do know that if there is a hell, I’ll be seeing many of you there, I’ll keep the fires stoked.”
To seasoned players, it seemed as though Eris had turned his suicide into a posthumous round of Epic Mafia. Was he a “civilian” trying to flag legitimate danger? Or was Eris actually “mafia”, throwing shade on innocent players by implying they were hiding dark secrets?
Shocking things had happened to members of the Epic Mafia community before. On 21 November 2011, a popular Epic Mafia player – 22-year-old Lauren Susanne Smith, who went by the name Pafff (a portmanteau of “pancakes” and “waffles”) – disappeared after being dropped off by her cousin at a residence in the rural community of Leon, Virginia, for what she said was a house-cleaning job. She carried with her several thousand dollars in cash and a small handgun. The Madison County Sheriff’s Department launched an investigation, and Smith’s family set up a “Help Find Lauren Smith” Facebook page. Smith has never been found.
In 2014, however, her Epic Mafia account suddenly came to life. Someone who had Pafff’s password – but who did not act like Pafff at all – began posting disjointed and disturbing messages to her account page, things like, “feed me pls, i’m all bones”, and “I am the christ”. The impostor managed to play a few games of Mafia under Pafff’s name before the site administrator was alerted and locked her account for ever.
Still, when the link to Eris’s suicide note was posted in the forums, no one mentioned his dark insinuations. Perhaps the Epic Mafia community had simply grown immune to drama, or maybe no one believed that Eris, known as a notorious gossip, was capable of taking secrets to his grave. The only thing that mattered was that Eris was dead. Even members of the Epic Mafia community who never knew Eris personally confessed to being affected by his death. “For four-and-a-half years you were a father figure to me,” one player wrote. “You were like the older brother I never had,” said another.
Eris’s enemies were finally contrite – “Not gonna lie,” a former hater named SirAmelio wrote, “i didn’t like you at all, but no one deserves this” – and his flaws burnished. Eris was “one clever f*cking dude”, “gross and out of line, but always hilarious” and one of the “best trolls of the 21st century”.
His friends, meanwhile, were left to grapple with the randomness and inadequacy of their final encounters (“it’s pretty weird thinking that the last conversation i ever had with you was about constipation …”). They tried to come up with a fitting memorial. “Can we start some sort of fundraiser in his honor?” wakemeupxo suggested the day after Eris’ death was announced. “He was brilliant at doxxing. Maybe start a small scholarship for computer science majors or something?”
How does one commemorate a troll? No one had a good answer to that.
In the wake of Eris’s suicide, past interactions took on a tragic new significance. One player with the username GordonRamsay, in a post on the memorial thread, described a phone conversation he had years earlier in which he talked Eris out of killing himself: “I felt like, in the matter of less than an hour, I had made a real impact on his life.” But Gordon said that he had flaunted the accomplishment, turning Eris into “an anonymous character in anecdotes I’d tell people to brag”. Now his pride felt shameful; he hated himself for never following up.
Others feared they might have actually played a role in Eris’s decision. One such player was the creator of the site, Lucid, a polymath who had launched a startup and earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a graduate degree in medicine, all before the age of 30. When Lucid learned that Eris had been banned, he was concerned. He told me that he’d had enough experience with people “whose lives are so involved with the internet that it’s their only social life” to fear what might happen should he be permanently cast out into physical reality.
To the frustration of the site administrator and the dozen or so moderators, Lucid had always been fond of Eris, who he considered the site’s honorary jester. Two weeks before Eris’s suicide note appeared, the two spoke by phone. “I could already tell he was very sullen and depressed,” Lucid recalled. “I knew [Epic Mafia] meant a ton for him, and … if I could just get him back on the site everything [would] be fine”. So Lucid offered the mods a deal: he would do some coding on the site, closing the security holes that Eris had exploited, and in return, they would lift the ban. But the moderators were tired of playing whack-a-mole with Eris; if Lucid insisted on protecting him, they threatened to quit en masse.
A few days before news of Eris’s suicide broke, Lucid had promised to call him with an update on the negotiating effort. Lucid was still confident he could get the ban reversed, but he needed more time. The call never happened. Lucid does not remember why; maybe he was too busy, or maybe he simply did not want to be the bearer of bad news.
“Then Tuesday came along, and I went to work, and that morning I received a phone call.” It was a close friend of Eris’s, a player named runwithfire, calling to say he was dead. His co-workers watched Lucid go pale before he excused himself from the office. “Of course I felt awful because my thought was that I didn’t do enough for him,” Lucid said.
But the administrator whose decision it was to permanently ban Eris from the site felt neither guilty nor responsible. Vancy, a blue-haired college student from Canada, had long seen the suicide coming. They had been Skype-chatting about Eris’s depression for months, like in this conversation on the morning of 25 October 2014:
Vancy: Are you okay?
Eris: I am not
Eris: okay
Eris: I am
Eris: rather suicidal today
Vancy: What’s wrong?
Vancy: ah
Eris: and this site
Eris: isn’t helping me
Eris: at all
Eris told Vancy that he had been taking antidepressants for years, switching from Prozac to Welbutrin, but the drugs left him numb, and though drawn to the idea of therapy, Eris was too much of a cynic to believe it would do him much good. “Like I remember I actually spoke to the psychologist my doctor recommended to me,” Eris wrote in a Skype chat with Vancy, “and I basically told him psychology is just like, witch doctory for westerners and I might as well go sacrifice a chicken or a goat and pray to the loas or something.”
“In a way,” Vancy said of Eris’s death, “I thought he might finally be at peace.”
Even though Eris had never met any Epic Mafia players in the flesh, he developed intense relationships with many of them. In his suicide note, he addressed a number of players directly, including runwithfire: “Know when I said I loved you I meant it.” The 20-year-old college student from Kansas denies ever having a romantic relationship with Eris, even though they did “joke about having babies”. She does admit, however, to being emotionally dependent on him. “He was, you know, my diary,” she told me. They Skyped constantly. “I don’t remember what we talked about or anything like that. We just kept each other sane,” she said. “In a way.”
Runwithfire knew about Eris’s childhood abuse and his depression, but unlike Vancy, she was stunned to learn of his suicide. When a mutual friend, a player named Probably Not Rose, called with the news, she immediately burst into tears. Like many other players, she Googled Eris’s real name only to find an obituary in the Sullivan County Tribune stating that the date of his cremation had already passed. She didn’t go to college the next day. Or the day after that. Instead, runwithfire barricaded herself inside the home she shared with her parents, spending hours crying and Skyping:
[4/27/15, 11:34:04 AM] probably not rose: i cant stp crying
probably not rose: i threw up
probably not rose: twice
Katie: I dont know
Katie: What go do
probably not rose: im ljust rocking back and forth
probably not rose: and hoping its not reall y happening
For three days, runwithfire gathered memento mori. She pored over Eris’s old text messages. She asked mutual friends to send pictures of him. She even called his mobile phone in the hope of getting hearing his voicemail message – “He just has such a specific voice and I loved it” – but it had already been disconnected. She did not know if she was going to be able to “pick herself back up”. Life, runwithfire had come to feel, “was a very dark place without him”.
On the Tuesday following Eris’s suicide, runwithfire had just finished having lunch with her father, the first time she had ventured out of the house since she heard the news. They were talking outside his office when she received a text message and began hyperventilating. She managed an excuse and ran outside. “I was just heaving and I couldn’t breathe,” she said. There was a man standing nearby who was looking at her in open alarm. “I leaned over in a bush. I thought I was going to throw up.”
“I couldn’t not talk to you,” the text said.
It was Eris.
It had taken Eris two days to create an entire fake news site to host his fake obituary. The suicide note wouldn’t be enough, he realised. What if his friends thought he had just overdosed on pills, and was alive somewhere, half-comatose? Without convincing evidence that he was already dead, they might try to save him. So he made up a name, bought the “Sullivan County Tribune” URL, and seeded it with articles from other news outlets. He took care to mention that his remains would be cremated (no body, no grave), and fudged some of the details about his family (who had no idea of his “death”), and his exact location (he said he had died in a nearby town).
In Epic Mafia, there is a word for the act of scanning someone’s messages for clues as to whether they are mafia: scumreading. Careful inspection of the Sullivan County Tribune website might have revealed that listed among the newspaper’s staff was one Nikita Petrov – a Russian historian acclaimed for his books about the Soviet secret police, who Eris was known to admire. But no one scumread Eris’s suicide note. Or his obituary. His clues were never found.
Over the years, Eris had grown tired of his toxic online persona, even come to hate himself. He realised a lot of his activities on Epic Mafia could be “classified as mildly to moderately dickish”. As to why he was such a dick, he wasn’t really sure. He had always loved pranking people. That photo of the ill-used My Little Pony? He hadn’t really jerked off on it; the “ejaculate” was just guar gum, an ingredient commonly used to thicken toothpaste, mixed with a little egg and flour – a recipe he found on Reddit. Besides, exploiting Epic Mafia’s security loopholes was also a way of reporting them, a “win-win”. As for the doxxing, it only grew out of wanting to know people better. “It’s rather odd to me that we live behind all these fake identities,” Eris told me via Skype chat. “I was just curious, more than anything, about who people were behind their handles.” Soon, however, trolling and doxxing became a form of self-medication, a “way to ease some of my bad feelings”. Then even that stopped working. He grew increasingly stressed out and depressed.
There was one other motivation for Eris to fake his own death. After Eris was banned from the site, some of the mods, fearing Lucid would reinstate him, came up with their own idea of how to keep Eris away from Epic Mafia. They would trawl the web for his personal information and put it up for public view; they would finally dox Eris. When a friend tipped him off about the plot, Eris panicked. It was impossible to know how far such a campaign might go, but he had given the mods little cause for mercy. Mostly, he worried about his family. “I grew up in a fairly small town with more cows than people. Not saying they don’t know anything, but it would still freak them out to have random strangers from the internet calling them.” His enemies seemed to have boxed him in, unless he could find a way of calling Game Over.
“I really hadn’t wanted to be myself for some time, but it’s rather impossible to cease being yourself in real life,” said Eris. “I figured I’d just beat them to the punch and dox myself via fake suicide.” His obituary would reveal certain personal information that he would rather keep private, but it would also stem the worst of the damage by shaming his enemies into abandoning their hunt. After all, what kind of monster would dox a dead man?
It never occurred to Eris that he had chosen the trolliest means possible to quit being a troll. “Now it just seems, very bizarre and a tad messed up,” Eris admits, but faking his suicide made sense at the time. His real life and his virtual life were completely separate. His socialising took place almost entirely online; in real life, he had few friends and preferred to be alone. Even if he used his legal name in the obituary, no one he interacted with in person would discover it.
“If I had to be surrounded by books or people,” Eris admitted to me, “I guess I’d take books.” And yet, Eris still craved human interaction. He came to Epic Mafia for the game, but he stayed for people like runwithfire, whom he describes as “the best friend a person could have”. Some of these friends wanted to meet in person, “crossing the divide”, as Eris puts it, but he always refused. “To be honest, the idea is still a tad strange to me.”
Eris also found it hard to believe that news of his suicide would have “much of an impact on people I’ve never met before”. And so he posted his obituary, disconnected his cell phone and watched his plan unfold. Then he promptly went back to playing Epic Mafia – under a new name.
Faking your death, coding an entire bogus newspaper, posting a dramatic suicide note full of conspiracy theories – these things all seem extreme. And yet, being a fly on the wall at one’s own funeral is a commonplace fantasy. Now Eris was experiencing that fantasy in real time, a living man scrolling through shocked reactions to his own death. As he did so, he discovered he wasn’t the only fantasist haunting the forums.
“Cloudminion said I’d sent him some sort of package like with a stuffed rabbit in it?” Eris said. “I was like WTF? And also ummmm …” He claimed the exchange had never happened. Nor, he said, had GordonRamsay talked him out of killing himself. “I would say it was some sort of guilt response,” Eris told me, “but neither of those people had any reason to feel guilt.” (Neither Cloudminion nor GordonRamsay responded to my interview requests, and neither user has logged on to the site in the past six months.)
Eris’s own guilt, however, had started to grow as he realised the psychological toll his death was taking on those who cared about him. “I saw people were having issues dealing with it,” Eris said. “It was very strange, also touching. I didn’t realise I’d had an impact on so many lives.” Plus, “well, i cared about them”.
So five days after killing himself, Eris picked up the phone to make his first call. “I don’t think he understood to what level it would upset me,” runwithfire said of Eris’s revelation. “Are you serious?” she recalls thinking. “We’ve been friends for years.”
At first she had trouble accepting the fact that Eris was really alive. In the days that followed Eris’s supposed suicide, she would burst into tears thinking about him before realising that he was no longer dead. Even now, when discussing him, she still catches herself lapsing into the past tense. There was, runwithfire told me, no model for the peculiar process she was undergoing: the five stages of ungrieving. Sometimes she tried to work through these complicated feelings with Eris:
runwithfire: okay
runwithfire: this is really weird
runwithfire: half of me is still mourning >.>
runwithfire: you literally ruined my head
Eris: sorry
Eris: i love you, please stop mourning for me, men in my family live forever unless we die tragic deaths
Eris: by tragic i mean like getting stabbed by an immigrant in their bar and bleeding out
Nonetheless, runwithfire, whose Twitter bio reads, “Just a broken person trying to love Jesus and other broken people better,” decided to forgive Eris. “When God gives you a second chance in life,” she said, “you don’t waste it over anger.”
Lucid, who admits to being a “soft-hearted guy” was also more relieved than anything else to learn that Eris was alive. And the tech-nerd part of him cannot help but admire Eris’s skill. “I knew I was conned,” Lucid laughs. “I think it’s crazy, but I’m happy.”
Not everyone was so understanding. A close friend named Sach – whose own uncle had killed himself a week before Eris’s “suicide” – hung up on him when he contacted her via Skype. “He’s done some pretty dickish stuff,” Sach told me, “but this is the worst.” Vancy, a good friend of runwithfire, also refused to forgive Eris for toying with her emotions.
Most of his friends were simply angry and confused. They told him they had taken time off from work or school as a result of his actions, that news of his death had left them feeling broken. But beyond the site’s inner circle, the majority of players still had no idea Eris was alive. (“Epic Mafia coolness is measured by how soon thereafter you were informed that [Eris] faked his death,” one player later joked on the forums.)
Three months after his death, Eris was outed. He had been up one night Skyping with a player named “Clandestine”, when she confessed that she had just swallowed a handful of pills. Because Clandestine would not give up her street address, Eris contacted an Epic Mafia administrator, who could only be cajoled into accessing Clandestine’s account information after he revealed his true identity. But, according to Eris, when the police arrived at Clandestine’s house, she told them she was fine and sent them away. The next day, news that Eris was alive spread through the forums. “So that,” he said, “was sort of the end of my pseudocide.”
In the discussions that eventually followed, players seemed more weary than surprised that Eris had tried to log himself out of existence. Maybe nothing on the internet surprised them any more.
“Yo can someone fill me in on the last 3 years?” one long-absent player posted on the forums. “All I know is that [Eris] left a suicide note but didnt kill himself.”
“Everything sucks and nothing matters,” replied someone named ScubaSteve. “The end.”
Almost nine months have passed since Eris faked his death. Since then, both Vancy and runwithfire have quit the site. “Last year my notion of volunteering was leading a website full of unappreciative overdramatic teenagers,” Vancy said. “Now it’s helping kids with special needs at the local YMCA.” Runwithfire started graduate school this fall. “I finally got busy,” she said, with some measure of relief.
As for Eris, he is feeling better – a change he credits to a new regime of antidepressants and returning to church. Not so much for the God-worshipping part, but because it’s nice to “sit and listen to a sermon and maybe talk to people afterwards”.
A month ago, Eris also found a new girlfriend, a woman he met through Epic Mafia and whom he describes as being as “dark, morbid and kind-of screwed up” as he is. “When I told her about [my fake suicide] she thought it was kind of funny.” They have not met in person yet, but she lives in Pennsylvania and Eris hopes she will soon make the drive to New York, so he can take her out on a proper date. “The old ways are the best,” he said.
He’s thinking dinner and a movie.
Illustrations by Paul Blow