'Five Nights at Epstein's' Online Game Attracting Teens and Tweens Drawn to 'Taboo Material'
News about the Epstein files may no longer be dominating news cycles, but that doesn’t mean it’s not top of mind for your tween — in online-game form, believe it or not.
“Five Nights at Epstein’s,” a laptop-accessible video game that tasks players with getting off (Jeffrey) Epstein’s island without being abused by Epstein, Trump, or Stephen Hawking, is reportedly being played in middle-school classrooms across the country, prompting the latest worried effort among educators to get eyes off screens.
“My students were playing it today,” noted a teacher in a recent Reddit thread about the game, a new version of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” that also inspired “Five Nights at Diddy’s” during the time of Sean Combs’s trial. “I didn’t see what it looked like, but it made my stomach turn to know it was happening and hearing them make comments about it. Just wanted to put it on your radar. I reported it to our tech guy and it will hopefully be blocked.”
“Para in middle school here,” noted a commenter. “I saw some students playing this game and told them absolutely not, turn it off before you lose all technology in this classroom. They treated me like I took away their birthdays.”
Another teacher added, “I had this problem today as well, so I decided to take the opportunity to really give the kids some guilt about it. Ask them plainly if they thought sex trafficking of people their age is funny.”
A description of the game on one source, Zap Games, calls it a “short-form survival horror game that mixes Five Nights-style mechanics with sharp, dark humor,” and explains that, while playing, you’ll be trapped in a bathroom on a “heavily monitored island facility.” Rescue is coming, but first you must survive five nights. “Played alone, it’s genuinely nerve-wracking,” it notes. “Played with friends at school, it becomes the kind of chaotic, laugh-through-the-fear experience people keep talking about.”
But adults are not laughing.
“The kids don’t get how sick this is? Do the adults? We are living in a full-blown genocidal pedocracy,” said one Redditor. “Is it any wonder that the kids are nihilists?”
Another added, “I find it increasingly difficult to get upset with kids making light of Epstein when there have still been no convictions. They shouldn’t be held to a higher standard than adult society.”
“Parents we spoke to,” Bloomberg News reporter Alexandra Levine told NPR about her recent reporting, “really were emphasizing that this is just one example of how what happens through a screen can be just as harmful as real life experiences, mainly because it is desensitizing these kids, making them numb to some horrific and violent and illegal behavior, and also because it’s dehumanizing to the victims.”
Why would kids be drawn to such a game, and how should parents address it? Below, experts weigh in.
Why Are Teens and Tweens Drawn to “Five Nights at Epstein’s”?
“Teenagers are generally drawn to taboo, forbidden or graphic material, especially if presented in a ‘game’ format,” says Dr. Lori Bohn, a psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner and medical director at at Voyager Recovery Center.
Plus, it could be a coping mechanism. “Young people are still developing their sense of what is just and right in society,” Bohn says. “An open-ended psychological loop, for example, created by an unresolved event such as that involving Jeffrey Epstein can result in young people recreating or ‘gamifying’ these events because they do not know how to address confusion, fear or other feelings.”
Adds trauma therapist and mom of two teens Cristina Billingsley, clinical director of Sierra Center for Wellness in California, “A recurrent theme I’m seeing clinically is how young people struggle with processing triggering or complex information, which is highly prevalent in the digital age.”
From a neurobiological perspective, Billingsley says, it makes sense that kids are drawn the game, even if they don’t fully understand it. “Adolescents are biologically wired for curiosity, boundary pushing, and seeking new experiences. The combination of those traits and interacting with dark or taboo content through a game, can be a way of trying to understand what they’re seeing,” she explains.
“In that regard,” she says, “it can allow a sense of working something out — almost like a child does during play therapy — especially when it involves adult world elements like power imbalance, secrecy, and lack of accountability.”
How to Talk to Your Kid About the Game
Billingsley says that the important thing “is to not over pathologize it,” and understand that, for a lot of kids, it’s simply about shock value.
“Overreacting or shutting it down produce a paradoxical effect,” she says, prompting adolescents to seek out more information that might be too overwhelming to fully understand. Instead, look at it as an opportunity for dialogue.
“Approaching this with curiosity, such as ‘tell me what you’ve heard about this’ or ‘what do you think about it,’ helps to engage kids in conversation about what they’re seeing and how it impacts them,” Billingsley says. That will give them the opportunity to think more critically about what they’re choosing to consume online.
“It’s also an important opportunity to talk about consent, safety and power imbalances in ways that are developmentally appropriate to the kids’ age and maturation level,” she suggests. “Excessive details are unnecessary; kids need guidance but not overexplaining to help make sense of the themes and messages of what they’re seeing.”
Finally, notes Bohn, it’s important to keep in mind that our kids are increasingly exposed to disturbing or inappropriate content online.
“This can create ambiguity for young people regarding what is serious and what is simply ‘content,’” she says. “When topics such as this one become meme-ized or transformed into a gaming experience, there is potential for reducing empathy for victims of abuse and replacing it with a feeling of excitement or humor.”
That’s why it’s important to approach any discussion “with an element of curiosity,” finding out what your kid knows about the situation and what they think about it,” she says. “There are likely many children who do not realize who Epstein was or why this situation presents an issue.”