Halloween 2010 - A Digital Ghost Story

I've been putting on Halloween games with a friend of mine for the past 3 years. I may write more about the others later but Halloween 2010 was both the most technically ambitious and has the biggest cool factor so it'd benefit the most from being written down.

We wired several rooms of a friend's house with every laptop and webcam we could find. After a couple hours of troubleshooting and lots of swearing, we built a mini-Panopticon where the feeds from the webcams were fed into Skype and viewable from a single conference call feed. This was routed to a TV upstairs surrounded by yet more laptops.

The payoff? A ghost story. Our "ghosts" would sit upstairs and relay "hauntings" to the laptops down below. The black-clad GMs would toss about soda bottles, flicker the lights on and off and generally serve as the instrument of the ghosts' will. The ghosts were limited in what they could do to a small selection of powers. They could move objects around or finger paint in available materials, but not display the fine manipulation necessary to wield a pen. And there were four of them, so there is a certain amount of interference on the line...

It worked wonderfully, for the most part. The ghosts had a blast messing around with people. The "Poltergeist" of the group gleefully requested chairs pulled away, beer bottles chucked at heads (this was mimed), etc. The younger, more hesitant ghosts tried to communicate, but there were misunderstandings on both ends as the humans confused the message and the ghosts misinterpreted their response.

The humans were very creeped out by the strange things happening to them. They could have used a little more direction, however. They were at the mercy of the ghosts with no other goal in sight for too long.

More then anything else, this drilled home how important how important it is to have a community. Only because of the hard work by everyone involved is this a story about a cool thing happening and not a story about that time I went insane.

Thanks to:

• The people who made delicious food. We GMs didn't have to lift a finger and yet tasty treats materialized at the right place at the right time.
• The people who turned a nice house into an abandoned one and the homeowner who thought it would be fun to do.
• The band, who only had about a months worth of warning.
• The many people who lent us laptops or webcams.
• Our friend the MS employee, who wrote the custom ticketing system that allowed the GMs to keep track of the ghosts' requests.