“I PLAYED TILL LEVEL 8”

Navneet Singh (name changed on request), a first year college student in Chandigarh, started playing the Blue Whale challenge game for the thrill of it. “I was curious. Of course I knew that the last step is killing yourself. But I never intended to play till the end. I just wanted to see what exactly happens in the game,” says Singh, who pulled out after playing till the eighth level.

Singh says he was provided a “hacked version of the game” by a friend. “I have heard that it is a Russian game, but I didn’t register on any social networking site. My friend just asked for my mobile and uploaded the game on it directly,” says the student, who says the tasks that were given to him were very easy.

“I had to draw a whale on a paper, get up at 4.20 am. The administrator sent me some music which I was told to listen to when I woke up, but it was soft, happy music. I don’t know what language it was in,” he says. Singh says he can’t figure out how the game can manipulate someone to hurt himself and ultimately commit suicide.

His eighth task, says Singh, was to put the line “#iamwhale” as his status on social media. “After I did that people started advising me to stop playing. My parents also got to know. I had to stop,” says Singh. His Facebook wall still has the status and a long thread of comments from friends asking him to stop playing the game. But experts say that Singh might have played a fake version, if it was indeed uploaded on his phone, for that’s not how the challenge operates.