Moirai

» see moirai-game.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Moirai was released on 25 November 2013 by Chris Johnson, Brad Barrett and John Oestmann, three people making something experimental rather than a studio making a product. It was free, it took about fifteen minutes, and it looked like a crude first-person adventure with blocky pixel art. A farmer asks you to find his missing wife. You take a lantern, go down into a cave, and partway in you meet a figure in bloodstained overalls holding a knife.

You get to ask three questions, all of them the obvious ones. The blood on the overalls comes first, then the knife. The last one is about the moaning you heard further down the tunnel. The figure types replies, you read them, and then you walk past and find the wife's body, and then you leave the cave carrying the knife yourself. On the way out you meet another player coming down, who asks you the same three questions. You type your own answers into the same text box.

That is the whole design, and it only works once. The replies you read at the start were written by a real human being who played before you, and the replies you typed on the way out go to the next person. The game then emails you later to tell you what that person decided to do with you. Something like 500,000 people downloaded it across the developers' own site, Game Jolt, itch.io from 2014, and Steam from 23 July 2016, and a meaningful fraction of them spent a while afterward thinking about what they had typed to a stranger while holding a knife.

The vulnerability was in the obvious place. A game whose core mechanic is an open text field passed between untrusted strangers has one surface, and in June 2017 somebody found it. A scripting attack flooded the database with obscenities, repeatedly, which meant new players were no longer meeting a person. They were meeting spam. Johnson said publicly that he knew how to stop it and had neither the time nor the money to do it, and on 29 June 2017 he pulled Moirai from Steam, itch.io and Game Jolt. No player email data was taken in the attack.

~ the dossier ~

~ the question ~

What made Moirai land was that the writing was outsourced to the audience and the audience did not know it. People gave sincere answers, or jokes, or nothing at all, and every one of those was then experienced by the next player as characterization. A one-word reply read as a man too shaken to speak. An elaborate lie read as a man who had rehearsed. The developers wrote almost none of the game's best moments. They built the machinery that made strangers write them for each other.

~ why there is nothing to preserve ~

Plenty of dead games can be run from an archived copy. Moirai cannot, in the way that matters. The files are not the game. A fan demake exists on itch.io, and the original has circulated, but what you get is the shell: a figure in a cave with no one behind the text, giving you canned responses in place of a stranger's typing. The thing that was actually being preserved was the live chain of players, and a chain like that cannot be backed up, only kept running.

~ the distance ~

I did not play this one while it was alive, and finding out about Moirai in 2026 is in a sense the same experience most people had in 2017, because the overwhelming majority of the writing about it was published at the moment it died. It got far more coverage as a shutdown than it ever got as a release. Its reputation and its unavailability arrived at the same time, which is an unkind sequence for a game that cost nothing and asked only that you be honest with a stranger for one sentence.

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