Did you ever play School as a child, perhaps with your sister as a teacher and you and your siblings as the students? Or raided your mother’s pantry for canned goods to sell at your Store? And of course there’s the ubiquitous Tea Party where your dolls and other toys are the invited guests.
Children’s play often emulate what the see in the adults in their lives, real-world experiences when out with your parents, or what is watched on television or videos. Fairly normal for almost any child, but not normal for adults because – duh – we’re adults (or like to believe so). I recently have been forced to re-evaluate that distinction.
My Virtual Office
Gather.town is a virtual office tool that emulates a working office for remote working environments for those whom regularly work from home or for teams geographically distributed. An office is created which roughly represents what you’d find in a corporate office: desks for working, conference rooms for meeting, cafeterias for lunching. Our office even includes an outdoor roof top for hanging out. Cute.
Let’s talk about participating in a virtual office.
Setup
Each user (employee) in your office a customizable avatar: skin color, hair color/style, facial hair, shirts, pants, etc. A plethora of options to make your avatar you, including silly (unnecessary) accoutrement such as sousaphone or a rabbit hat. If you’re a minimalist, remove absolutely everything and appear to be nude (as I found out). Do it once, do it daily, do it multiple times per day, whatever floats your boat.
Next, claim a desk in your team’s work area and customize it: desk style, monitors, plants, chairs, rugs. Compared to real life, totally unrealistic as – other than plants – you take whatever you’re given. Guess it allows you to dream that you are in charge more than is realistic!
Time To Play!
You’re done customizing, turn on your camera and put on your headphones and start working.
Desk Time
While working at your desk, you’ll hear others working nearby as their microphones are on capturing whatever it is they are doing: keyclicks, background music, conversations, pets, farts. As you navigate around the office (using the arrow keys), you’ll hear the appropriate ambient sounds of whomever you pass – which might include confidential conversations. Just as in an office.
To collaborate, walk over to another person’s desk and the cameras turn on and you’ll having an in-person conversation. Just like in an office. Or join someone in the hallway and do the same, Gather turns your cameras and you’re face-to-face with whomever you need to dish dirt with.
[I say this without actually experiencing it, as I’ll explain later. But others have tried this and the tool’s web site shows the same.]
You can make your status Do Not Disturb which turns off your camera and microphone.
Meeting Time
Click on a meeting link or navigate your avatar to the conference room where your meeting is being held. Upon entering the room, your camera and microphone are enabled while you are participating in the meeting. Share screens just like any number of other platforms (Zoom, Teams, Slack, Google Meet, etc.). The only surprise I had is lack of an explicit Leave Meeting button; instead, navigate out of the conference room and go elsewhere (most likely back to your desk).
Review
I don’t get it, it’s simply a video game purporting to be a collaboration tool.
- One justification for an org-wide proof-of-concept is that, in a smaller proof-of-concept, ad-hoc meetings were reduced by over 50%, replaced by walking over to someone’s desk and having a quick conversation…..which, by definition, is an ad-hoc meeting. An interruption is an interruption.
- Personally, I don’t want or need to hear ambient office noises or conversations occurring nearby; in fact, in offices I always wear headphones so I can get actual work done (which is the purpose of employment, correct?).
- Gather meetings are identical to other tools, perhaps without some of the bells-and-whistles (e.g., emojis or drawing on shared screens, not sure but haven’t seen anything).
- I don’t need yet another communications channel to monitor and use.
Final Thoughts
The peers I’ve spoken with share my views that Gather is a complete waste of time: I’m not more connected with the organization, I’m not collaborating better, I’m not feeling better about my work. As someone said to me Just treat us like adults, don’t make a game of it.
And that’s the crux of it: Gather allows you to play office: perhaps more sophisticated than your youth, but ultimately it’s still a game. I’ve explained the concept of a virtual office to friends who roll their eyes and ask Are you fucking kidding me? It sounds infantile and asinine, and I agree.
[And yes, there are positive discussions and posts about Gather, how they can’t imagine work without it, but not sure what businesses or roles or importance to it. Personally haven’t met any one like that, but inevitably I’m sure there are those who like the game.]
To date, the POC has been each Thursday; after Thanksgiving the organizers are asking for Monday through Thursday (at least for one week) to drive buy-in harder through enforced usage. Sure, whatever….I’ll log in, change my status to Do Not Disturb, and continue to ignore it.
What a waste.
