04/01/2024

A Haunted Discord Server Is the Last Good Place Online

In the indie game "This Discord Has Ghosts In It," your mission is to communicate

In a charming game called "This Discord Has Ghosts in It," up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator. Each character has a secret motivation, chosen at the start of the game: For investigators, their secret is the reason they are in the house; for ghosts, it’s what pins their shade to the mortal realm. Your MO is not to win but to "give away the game," as the very purple game manual states. That means figuring out a way to communicate your secret to the other team.

The problem is, you’re not allowed to just say it. Ghosts can interact with the game only via text-based chat. They can type descriptions of their hauntings, share images and GIFs, link to songs and videos and add new rooms to the house. Meanwhile, investigators are confined to Discord’s voice call function. Like investigators on TV, they narrate the haunts they see and the rooms they enter to the other investigators wandering other corners of the house, all while trying to stay in character.

Like any bit of technologically mediated communication, this gets messy. In one game, I was Alicia Macready, a foolhardy investigator on a mission to capture hair-raising footage from inside a haunted house and land a TV deal. At the start of gameplay, I had Alicia meander into the basement. There, she ran into the ghost of Buried Ben. Ben had died in an unfortunate accident involving a pile of boxes. He also held a grudge over being cut out of his family’s fortune, which kept him stuck in the house. My character, Alicia, didn’t know any of that. In an attempt to show Alicia how he died, Buried Ben played a YouTube video of objects being crushed. "The doors slam shut," he typed into the chat. "The walls start closing in on you." But Alicia read what was happening and saw only a horrible trap.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.