Reddit is an online community featuring user-created forums, called subreddits.
It’s no exaggeration to say that whatever your interests may be, there are subreddits that cater to them.
And with nearly 1.5 billion registered users and 52 million daily users, Reddit is essentially the internet’s all-inclusive safe haven.
Of course, with so many differing personalities on the site, there are bound to be some strange people, a perfect example being u/YAYVIDEOGAMES.
But who was the enigmatic user? Were his rambling, nonsensical comments a genuine picture of one person’s descent into madness?
Who Was u/YAYVIDEOGAMES?
In September of 2010, a thread was posted in the Gaming subreddit. It asked users to name their favorite mods for The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion: an ordinary question.
However, a user bearing the screen-name u/YAYVIDEOGAMES chimed in with a very unordinary answer.
“The uninstall button,” he wrote. “The game is great and all that, but God, it is hard to fully remove all the junk it leaves behind on your system. You really need to check out that mod when the time comes to get rid of it. Otherwise, I think Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul is a nice start.”
When pressed by another user to explain his incomprehensible word salad, YVG doubled down on the strangeness, replying, “The uninstall button… The game is great. Ubisoft goes Steamworks bye bye, always on DRM. But you oft go work, always on work DR. Check out the junk it leaves behind in you.”
u/YAYVIDEOGAMES: Troll or Genuine Madman?
Once again, YVG was asked to interpret his cryptic responses.
But instead of doing so, he upped the ante yet again, populating the thread with over 4,000 comments in the span of just a few hours.
Every comment was some kind of variant of his catchphrase, “Ubisoft goes Steamworks bye bye, always on DRM.”
Some even contained embedded links to eerie images, none of which related in any way to video games.
If YVG had been a troll, he was definitely a bit too dedicated to the act.
His spam resulted in his account being banned from posting or commenting. He deleted his account shortly afterwards.
Another Redditor Attempts to Solve the Mystery of u/YAYVIDEOGAMES
A Redditor using the screen-name u/SoLegitHS had for a long time been fascinated by the mystery of u/YAYVIDEOGAMES.
He took it upon himself to dig through the internet archive of YVG’s posts. To his shock, he found what may be the key to understanding the motivations of YVG.
Apparently, YVG had been a frequent poster in another subreddit, r/Cleanliness. In it, he would make, as one might guess, cryptic posts.
In a post entitled “Magic,” for example, he wrote, “I need some for help. I would not use it evilly.”
However, it was not merely the presence of YVG that made r/Cleanliness significant to solving the mystery.
It was the fact that nearly every other poster in the sub typed in the same cryptic dialect as YVG.
u/SoLegitHS deduced that all of these posters—among whom were u/NotSureHowBigYouAre, u/NoSubstanceHere, and u/VinylRecord—were likely the same person: YVG.
The Story Takes a Sad Turn
Of all the accounts owned by YVG, u/NotSureHowBigYouAre seemed to be his primary. It contained eight years’ worth of posts and comments, the earliest of which were, believe it or not, spoken clearly and concisely.
(It seems that the user adopted his trademark repetitious word salads later on).
One post, entitled “Melbourne, Victoria, Australia” even gave insight into who YVG actually was as a person. It read:
“Spare bed here, if you don’t mind an over-medicated chronic pain sufferer being generally irritable, of course.
I’m an ex-Jehova’s Witness myself, which, if you aren’t familiar, sort of automatically makes someone accustomed to people being rendered homeless due to an oppressive religious environment. Almost went through it myself back-when.”
Comments on other posts revealed that in addition to chronic pain, YVG suffered from extreme cases of depression, anxiety, and chronic fatigue syndrome.
He described having nightmarish hallucinations, for which he was prescribed heavy doses of antipsychotics.
However, not even these could quell his inner demons. He sought out stronger drugs, specifically opiates and soon found himself addicted.
Clearly, YVG was not a troll. He was genuinely ill.
u/YAYVIDEOGAMES, aka Lyndon
While u/SoLegitHS was able to single-handedly determine that YVG was not a troll, it was still unknown what came of him.
He stopped posting on all of his accounts years ago, leading many to believe that he took his own life. Unfortunately, these suspicions were proven true.
With the YVG mystery becoming prevalent on the internet, people who knew him in real life came forward with news of his passing.
YVG’s real name was Lyndon, and his best friend Luke had the following to say in his own Reddit post addressing the now-solved mystery:
“Lyndon was an amazingly kind and intelligent guy who was really creative… I know he would have loved that there is this much mystery around him after he’s left us but I think there’s some important topics to cover here re: chronic pain, self-medication, “invisible” illness, the allied health system and how important it is to seek to be among others in some way,” his friend wrote.
“I hope that we can draw some closure out of this and hopefully move a little closer towards having further understanding and compassion towards people who may be in the position Lyndon suffered through.”
