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A man I’ve never met stands at a payphone in Sydney’s CBD.

“A serene small park directly to the right of the payphone,” he says poetically into the receiver. “There’s a man with an interesting cap sitting down there, and an ibis. I guess they’ll be immortalised in this phone voicemail forever.”

The man, whom I know only as GippslandGuardian, has visited 106 payphones since late April. I know this – and that he visited the CBD payphone – because we’re both playing a game called PayphoneGo, where he left this voicemail, that has created a strange sense of connection in a small corner of the internet.

There are 14,000 remaining payphones across the vast expanse of the country, in far-flung locations like the Oodnadatta Track and Lord Howe Island. But if you’re in a bustling metropolitan city, you probably barely notice them. They are so ubiquitous that they blend in with endless bus stops, traffic lights and electrical wires, only revealing themselves when we need them – or when we are trying to find them to accrue points for a game inspired by Pokemon Go.

That’s why I am attempting the noble task of visiting 50 across Sydney in a day. By pausing at these liminal spaces, I discover a secret side to the city: posters for lost birds, scrawled graffiti, empty coffee cups and vomit.

PayphoneGo was created in April by Kris Norris, a 19-year-old Brisbane student. The premise is simple: each player is assigned a nine-digit ID, which they enter after calling the website’s number from a payphone. Norris has connected the numbers of every payphone in Australia on her backend, so when players call in with their ID, they automatically accrue points.

If you’re the first person to call from a payphone, you get 20 points and can leave a voicemail that’s uploaded to the website and played to subsequent players who visit. The second visitor receives 10 points. After that, it goes down to five and then one.

Norris created the game to encourage people to “go out into the community, out into the world and explore”.

“It’s based on the idea of going back to [the] old internet: no ads, no tracking, so few cookies,” she says.

“I hate how commercialised and corporate the internet has become. I want to be able to make things just for the sake of having things for people to play. And payphones are a vital public service, but most people will just pass them, and ignore them.”

Since mid-2021, calls on Telstra payphones have been free in a move the telecommunications giant said would help protect vulnerable Australians. The decision attracted global headlines at a time when the world was winding back from payphones thanks to the never-ending rise of smartphones.

Australia’s universal service guarantee (USG) mandates under federal law that Telstra provide reasonable access to public payphones to all Australians – regardless of profitability.

About 4,000 of the 14,000 payphones also offer free wifi. The benefit for Telstra is advertising dollars. The telco doesn’t publicly disclose revenue from ads displayed on its payphones, but the USG allows it to place phones in high-traffic areas, avoiding the usual planning controls.

This has led to a backlash from some councils. In 2019, a coalition successfully took Telstra to court over a proposal for nearly 3-metre-tall phone booths.

Telstra’s payphone product owner, Pete Manwaring, says more than 100m calls have been made since fees were scrapped and usage has tripled, with 4m calls made from Sydney’s 1,918 payphones in the past year alone.

Payphones may seem quaint, but Manwaring says they remain an “incredibly important” essential service. About 37% of calls are to emergency services, helplines and government support numbers – including triple zero or crisis lines. Another 33% go to utilities.

Payphones were introduced in Australia in the late 1890s to help overcome the tyranny of distance. At their peak, in the 1990s, there were 80,000 payphones across the country.

Associate Prof Mark Gregory, from RMIT’s school of engineering, says a few years ago there were 20,000, 40% more than today. He says the lost 6,000 should be reinstalled and all payphones should offer free wifi.

“The cost for the upkeep of payphones isn’t huge, and there is a trade-off because, of course, there’s the advertising and marketing opportunity,” he says.

“The universal service guarantee is one of the few things that sets Australia aside from other nations in terms of telecommunications. We need to stand up and fight for it.”

Gregory is concerned that, as it stands, there are “black spots” without access to a payphone.

“It ultimately means that people can’t contact triple zero when they need to,” he says. “To me, a payphone means safety. They’re so important for people of low socioeconomic means and for people with disabilities, children and the elderly.”

Despite their decline, payphones are attracting a cult following online. Alongside PayphoneGo, more than 1,000 users are registered to play Payphone Tag, a “real-world territory capture game” created by independent developer Alex Allchin that allows you to build competitive maps.

Outside of the game, an Australian cybersecurity expert has also created an interactive map of every payphone in Australia – complete with the phone’s features and jurisdictional breakdowns.

The first payphone I call from when playing PayphoneGo this week is around the corner from my house – on a walk I take with my dog every day. I have never seen it in my life.

The next is covered in curious rubbish: an old vape, a half-drunk Dare iced coffee, a crushed Coke can.

At another, I find a dirty high chair, a broken-off manicured nail and a cigarette butt. Each payphone is an Easter egg: what will it hold? What condition will it be in? What hidden stairwell will it be tucked behind?

It’s both exciting and disturbing, like when I discover a telephone cord dangling off its hook and, on the ground, a large splatter of vomit being eaten by pigeons.

At one point, I have to wait because someone is using the payphone to talk to an actual person. I have never lined up for a payphone before.

I’m disappointed when I finally reach a string of payphones in Marrickville that have already been visited, so I can’t leave a message. I find myself dramatically sighing when a payphone is out of order.

Norris understands my new obsession. “My favourite thing to do is just sit on the website and refresh and listen to the new messages coming in,” she laughs.

“There are people talking about their favourite local areas, people talking about what they can see. Sometimes people are venting. People are singing.”

At 5pm, I call my partner and tell him I’ve clocked 40 payphones and don’t know whether to cut my losses. I’m eighth in Australia on the leaderboard of 40 players and have mapped all of Newtown, Enmore and Erskineville.

But 50, he agrees, is so much better than 40. In cricket terms, it’s a half-century. I push on.

In the darkness, I’m pleased to find the payphones lit up like beacons, but I’m also marred by fatigue. In my delirium, I start visiting the same payphones twice, sometimes three times. I pass others without noticing them, even though I have their location on a map.

But finally, 8.5 hours and 22,000 steps after I started, I reach payphone number 50 – and it’s in order. “That beautiful dial tone,” I mutter, beaming.

“I don’t really know what to do with my life now,” I say into the receiver. “Thank you so much for this opportunity.”