How to play a dubbing game over Discord
There is no Discord bot for this, and you do not need one. What you do need is to know which of the two methods falls apart, and where.
Dubbing games are built around a room: one screen, one machine, people watching each other make fools of themselves. That is the whole appeal and it is also the whole problem, because the people you want to play with are increasingly not in your house.
There are two ways round it. They are not equally good and the difference is not obvious until you are twenty minutes into an evening.
Method one: screen share a desktop game
One person runs the game and shares their screen into the call with sound routed through. Everyone else watches the shared window. Performers take their turn down the call, and the host drives every menu.
What you need for it to work at all:
- Screen share with audio, which on Discord means sharing a window or screen and enabling sound on the share rather than relying on your microphone picking up the speakers.
- The host on a wired connection if there is any choice in it. Everybody else's experience is their upload.
- Everyone else's microphone on push-to-talk, or the host's shared audio will duck constantly against six open mics.
And the two things that go wrong, which nobody mentions until it happens to them:
- Screen sharing compresses video, so the mouths on screen and the audio drift apart by a fraction of a second — and a fraction of a second is exactly the precision a dubbing game asks of a performer. You are asking people to hit marks on a picture that is slightly late.
- The host is doing a job all evening. They pick every scene, drive every menu and cannot really perform while doing it, because the moment they alt-tab everyone else is looking at a menu.
None of that makes it a bad evening. People do this and enjoy it. But it is a workaround around a game that was designed for a sofa, and it behaves like one.
Method two: use a game built for people being apart
The alternative is to keep Discord for the talking and let a browser game handle the playing. Everyone opens the same room in their own browser, so nobody is watching a compressed copy of somebody else's screen and nobody is stuck driving menus.
PartyDub is built that way: one person opens a room, everyone else joins with a six-character code, and each person dubs the same clip without hearing what anybody else did. Then it is all played back together and the room votes. The clip comes off whoever is hosting rather than out of a downloaded pack, so there is nothing to install and nothing to convert.
Two things worth knowing before you switch: it is free and needs no account to join, and it is made by the same person who runs this site. That second one is said here for the same reason it is said everywhere else on this site — a recommendation with an interest behind it should carry the interest with it.
Which one to use
| If | Use |
|---|---|
| Everybody is in the same house | The desktop game. Nothing beats one screen and a sofa. |
| Two or three people, all patient, one good connection | Screen share works fine. |
| Six people, mixed connections, a weeknight | A browser game. The drift and the host workload both scale badly. |
| You have specific packs you want to play | Screen share — packs are the desktop game's whole library. |
| You want to start in the next two minutes | A browser game. There is nothing to download. |
The honest summary is that screen sharing is free and already installed, and it costs you timing precision and one person's evening. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on how many of you there are.