'BLUE WHALE' GAME

Are teenagers killing themselves in Russia as part of a social media game?

There is a game played online across Russia that instructs people to commit suicide.

The game involves teen completing daily tasks for 50 days and on the 50^th day, they have to kill themselves to win the game.

The problem with the game came up after a high rate of suicides in Russia.

The game is called Blue Whale as a reference to the way some blue whales commit suicide getting into the beach.

Yulia Konstantinova, 15, and Veronika Volkova, 16, fell from the roof of a block of flats in Irkutsk and one of them had posted a picture of a blue whale on her social media account the same day of her death.

Another girl, Ekaterina, 13, was critically injured after falling from a fifth-floor flat in Krasnoyarsk.

Authorities have opened criminal cases looking into the influence of the game, but it wasn’t mentioned.

A Russian media has linked 130 suicides to the game, in fact, there aren’t official data that links any one death to the Blue Whale Game.

Nevertheless, the Blue Whale Game exists and is popular in Vkontakte, a social networking site popular among Russians.

The game includes self-harming, watching horror movies and waking up at unusual hours. Reporters crated a fake profile and one of the administrators asked to cut “F58” into their arm. The conversation finished after the reporter sent a photoshopped image.

References to the game are now appearing on other sites more popular like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

It seems unreal, how people can commit suicide only because a game. Is not the first time I heard about how teens kill themselves only because a reference. There appear a very popular series called 13 Reasons Why that’s about a teenager who commits suicide and after then, there are cases of suicide between teens.

I read somewhere that the proposal of this game is “clean the society”. The creator of the Blue Whale Game said once that the game’s goal is to makes people who “don’t deserve to life” commit suicide. He said that only mad people will take his life over and those people do not deserve life. This seems to me a very tragically phenomenon.