Last fall, when creating a Gather Town world, I focused largely on making it aesthetic/pretty. I endorse that as the right choice at the time, for the particular goals I had.
But, a recent update I’ve made is making extremely liberal use of gather town “conversation spaces” is a pretty valuable. (i.e. you can make an small area count as a “shared conversation node” where only people inside can listen. And you can make those relatively small.
My current guess/hope is that if you make the map mostly such places, they’ll feel like the natural place to have conversations, such that it’s actually less convenient to have a larger conversation.
I’m not sure that fully solves the problem, where often you have people who don’t have a particular conversation they want to have yet, and lurking is actually a reasonable choice. I think the solution of “pay attention to when people are moving around the outskirts of a conversation, and take that as a signal to start a new conversation” is a partial improvement.
(I also think Gather Town is approaching the point where you can use their default editor to make reasonably aesthetic maps that fit particular design choices)
Last fall, when creating a Gather Town world, I focused largely on making it aesthetic/pretty. I endorse that as the right choice at the time, for the particular goals I had.
But, a recent update I’ve made is making extremely liberal use of gather town “conversation spaces” is a pretty valuable. (i.e. you can make an small area count as a “shared conversation node” where only people inside can listen. And you can make those relatively small.
My current guess/hope is that if you make the map mostly such places, they’ll feel like the natural place to have conversations, such that it’s actually less convenient to have a larger conversation.
I’m not sure that fully solves the problem, where often you have people who don’t have a particular conversation they want to have yet, and lurking is actually a reasonable choice. I think the solution of “pay attention to when people are moving around the outskirts of a conversation, and take that as a signal to start a new conversation” is a partial improvement.
(I also think Gather Town is approaching the point where you can use their default editor to make reasonably aesthetic maps that fit particular design choices)