in the charming In a game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside there’s a maze-like (chat) room where each player takes on the role of a eponymous spirit or paranormal investigator. Each character has a secret motivation, chosen at the start of the game: for the investigators, their secret is the reason they are in the house; for the investigators, their secret is the reason they are in the house; For ghosts, this is what anchors their shadows to the mortal world. As the Very Purple game manual states, your goal is not to win, but to “abandon the game.” This means finding a way to communicate your secrets to other teams.
The thing is, you can’t just say it. Ghosts can only interact with the game via text-based chat. They can enter descriptions about haunted places, share images and GIFs, link to songs and videos, and add new rooms in the house. In the meantime, investigators can only use Discord’s voice calling feature. Like the investigators on TV, they recount the haunts they saw and the rooms they entered while trying to stay in character to other investigators hanging out in other corners of the house.
Like any technology-mediated communication, this can get confusing. In one game, I played Alicia Macready, a reckless investigator tasked with capturing creepy footage from inside a haunted house and landing a TV deal. At the beginning of the game, I had Alicia meandering into the basement. There she encounters the ghost who buried Ben. Ben was killed in a tragic accident involving a bunch of boxes. He also holds a grudge over the deprivation of his family’s property, which keeps him trapped at home. My character, Alicia, knows nothing about this. To show Alicia how he died, Bury Ben played a YouTube video of an object being crushed. “The door slammed shut,” he wrote in the chat. “The walls start closing in on you.” But Alicia read what was happening and saw only a horrific trap.
Alicia’s resulting fear sets the tone for the rest of the game. Ben wrote about the door to the new room in the house, pulling Alicia deeper into the room. I’m even more scared. I whispered into my headphones, describing how I banged on the doorknob and actively tried to escape the house. Through increasingly frantic sequences—video of a hydraulic press crushing Technicolor plastic toys, audio files of paper being washed and falling shelves—Ben leads Alicia to a storage room that contains a scrapbook full of cabinet. There, I finally learned Buried Ben’s real name—Benjamin Arrington! — and tells the story of finding a folded note in one of the books. Ben’s player seizes the moment and turns the piece of paper into a document proving his right to wealth, helping solve the problem of keeping him on Earth.
The final ritual of the game is the séance, where the ghost first summons all players into a room. Ghosts are still restricted to chat boxes and investigators are still restricted to audio channels, but for the first time everyone is allowed to communicate their secrets clearly. In the room, each player shares what they think they know about the others. Others also filled in any missing details. The team determines the character’s fate together. So what happened to Alicia and Ben? During the séance, she encourages him to let go of the past—and move on, so to speak. As they say goodbye, she gets the shot she wanted so badly: a glimpse of Ben flashing at the door of the house, finally able to leave.
Then I logged off.