Mystere (Everquest character)

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Mystere was the name of an Everquest character banned from the game by Verant, Everquest's developer, over a controversial roleplaying story, an event often referred to as the "Mystere incident". "Mystere", a male Everquest player on the Brell Serilis server who roleplayed and posted both as the female dark elf "Mystere" and, less frequently, a male Iksar character "Vhasst", wrote a fan fiction story which depicted the rape of a dark elf girl of "barely 14 seasons", including graphic descriptions of such acts as using a razor blade on the girl's vagina for lubrication. This story was posted under the name "Vhasst" on July 11, 2000 to third-party Brell Serilis server boards not affiliated with Verant or Sony.

At some point afterwards, an anonymous party contacted Verant complaining about Mystere's story. On October 4, 2000, Mystere was abruptly kicked out of Everquest, and the story was soon after removed from the IGN message board where it was originally posted. Upon contacting Verant, George Scotto, head of customer service, informed him that he had been banned. According to Mystere:

“ He told me that I had been banned for a very disturbing story I had written. I was further told that Sony 'didn't want my kind of people' playing their game. After attempting to defend myself by saying that it was a roleplay story only, and wasn't even posted on their boards, I was informed that the council had made their decision and it was immutable.[1] ”

The Everquest community was outraged. A small minority applauded Verant, accusing Mystere of being a "pervert" and a "child pornographer", but the large majority, including most professional writers about the video game industry, viciously condemned Verant for banning him, even if they found the story distasteful. Over the next week, hundreds of players threatened to quit the game and thousands flooded the Verant messageboards. Verant soon officially announced that Mystere had been banned from the game due to his story infringing intellectual property rights. Eventually John Smedley, president of Verant, spoke with Mystere and released a statement that they had arrived at a mutual agreement, and while Mystere would not be returning to Everquest, both parties were satisfied. When questioned by Gamespot, in an interview about the incident, about where the line in future would be drawn Smedley's answer was "we'll know it when we see it", which drew criticism for its vagueness.

While many attacks against Verant during the incident were for misguided reasons (a belief that they were infringing the First Amendment, or that "14 seasons" referred to character levels rather than the age of the character, despite Mystere's insistence that he meant "14 years old", an appropriately marrigable age in a medieval setting), debate centered around The incident touched off a major debate in the gaming community at large about free speech and where the line on intellectual property and roleplaying is drawn. It also led to the removal of a quest in the game which requires the player to murder a pregnant halfling (due to criticism that the quest was as violent as anything in Mystere's story), became the subject of academic papers, and inspired a Penny Arcade cartoon.

Some years later, on February 16, 2006, John Smedley brought up the incident again on his blog. Interestingly, he claims that Verant took the heat silently over the debacle because the full story could not be disclosed to the public, and involved allegations of criminal behavior:

“ ...we couldn’t tell the real story, which involved one player accusing this banned player of something that, if true, would have crossed major real-life moral and legal lines. I personally spoke with the person accused and there was enough that made me uncomfortable to decide the right thing to do was to keep this person out of our games altogether. The “fan fiction” story this player wrote certainly was a part of this decision, particularly when combined with the accusation made in-game...[2] ”

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