I had posted recently about the first wedding via a VOIP ceremony in Indonesia recently, and now comes the first suicide, certainly bringing up the darker side of VOIP. Apparently, a user gamer at the weekend took his own life while playing Metal Gear Solid online with his friends, chatting via VOIP, and broadcasting the whole thing on his webcam.

Mitchell “Mitch” Lee Stuekerjuergen, aka “Kuja105”, reportedly swallowed antifreeze and pills “after complaining about family problems and a lack of money”, forum administrator Boyan Georgiev is said to have told Bulgaria’s BGNES news agency on Wednesday. Stuekerjuergen subesquently died on 4 January in hospital in Illinois.

A certain amount of controversy surrounds the whole sorry affair, with some claiming that other forum members “thought the man was joking, even though he rambled for six hours about the effects of the substances and disappeared from view several times”, as AFP puts it. The webcam part of the story is also disputed.

Via The Register