Re: Disappointing take-up of Gather.Town

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 07:11:17PM +0000, John Scudder wrote:
> I consider myself reasonably social, by local standards :-), but by that I mean in meatspace. Back when MUDs were a thing, I took a look once and didn???t see the appeal. I just dipped in to the gather.town space and, quite apart from the tumbleweeds blowing through, I also don???t feel drawn to the simple pleasures of navigating a chunky-pixel avatar around gamespace, when I could be doing something else. It???s not like we lack for ways of connecting with one another when we want to, so hanging out in a rerun of Ultima II doesn???t seem like it brings a lot to the table.

I was more reminded of nethack than a MUD given the user experience.

Kidding aside:

I am not sure we do have good enough means to connect with each other
informally as we do have in real meetings. We do not have
well established equivalents of the real world options to understand when
its ok to engage in  short, unprepared exchanges, such as when one
makes onesself available by hanging out in hallways or any other type
of gathering with well understood norms of approaching other.

Thats ultimately what gather.town IMHO attempts to create, but i am
sure that a mix of such a user interface and emulating the real world
experience is just a starting point for discussion. But a worthwhile one.


Cheers
    Toerless

> 
> I see the value of trying to recreate casual, spontaneous social interaction in the virtual setting, emphasis on ???trying???. It would be wonderful if it worked, but as far as I can tell, it don???t. Not everything physical works virtually. Not everything virtual works physically. At least, not at this point in our technological evolution.
> 
> Never mind me, I???m just a curmudgeon.
> 
> ???John
> 
> P.S.: I reserve the right ??? of course ??? to change my mind!

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