The day after she lost her job, she committed suicide.

This, at least, was the story according to Sheyla's friend "Kinudin," who posted the tragic news to the popular "Lum the Mad" Everquest fan site. "Sheyla took her own life this past Saturday morning," Kinudin wrote Nov 14. "It seems that being fired as a guide was the final straw. She had a hard life, losing her mother at age 15 and hav[ing] a child at age 16 which was seized by the state because her father had her declared an unfit mother. At the time of her death, she had been trying unsuccessfully for a year to try and get custody of her daughter ... It is obvious that Sheyla took the Everquest world a little too seriously."

The tight-knit community of Everquest fans was shocked. Across the many bulletin boards populated by game players, Sheyla's friends and total strangers alike expressed their sorrow and disbelief, discussing how a tragedy like this could have been prevented and angrily blaming Verant, the company behind Everquest, for mishandling the dismissal of an emotionally unbalanced young woman.

A week later, however, it's beginning to appear that there was, in fact, no suicide -- and that there may not even have been a real Sheyla. Since Verant has refused to discuss the situation, Everquest community members have initiated their own investigation of the "suicide," turning up some perplexing information. Their research has unearthed a hidden drama behind a character that many Everquest players thought they knew well, but apparently didn't know at all.

The hoax has rocked the Everquest fans -- and set in motion yet another wave of doubt and concern over the "addictiveness" of virtual life. Fans of the game jokingly call it "Evercrack" for good reason. While fantasy games dating back at least as far as the paper-and-dice versions of Dungeons & Dragons have often been criticized for encouraging obsessive behavior, the current state of the art of online gaming has taken the quality and depth of virtual experience to new heights. Regardless of whether a young woman truly died, the dialogue sparked by the controversy is forcing a community-wide reassessment of the potential drawbacks to online life.

"It's bringing an underlying problem that had been there to light, and making a lot of people take a step back and take a look at themselves," says Chris Skinner, a two-year game veteran who has been inspired by the Sheyla situation to start a support group called Everquest Escape. "Even if it was a hoax, it was good for the community because people can see how serious this issue is and step forward and get help if they need it."

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