How Virtual Office App ‘Gather Town’ is Changing the Way We Work and Play

So much has changed in the span of a year and a half with a lot of us spending their days at home. Working from home has become the new normal for many adults, and while many of us have successfully adapted to our home offices, it's time for your virtual space to get an upgrade as well.

This is where Gather Town, a relatively new virtual office space, comes in. Basically, it allows users to set up an online space where they can meet up with other users, allowing them to recreate their work environments in 2D.

It essentially works like a top-down video game, where each user acts as a playable character in this virtual world. Each user can make their own avatar, customise their spaces to suit their needs, and even visit other virtual offices around the world.

Gather Town gamifies the working environment in a good way, turning everything into a top-down RPG-like experience, while integrating MMORPG-like elements that keep communications at the forefront.

Leveling Up

IGN Southeast Asia and our sister websites MyGameOn and Mashable Southeast Asia have been using Gather Town for the past month, customising each of our offices to include multi-level work spaces, personalised desks, and even games to play together.

Mashable Southeast Asia has posted a video on their virtual Gather Town office, which succinctly shows what you’re in for, should you decide to create one for your workmates.

So far, the IGN Southeast Asia and MyGameOn’s joint offices have been a great morale booster for all of us. We can easily collaborate on projects or even just hang out after working hours.

Exhilarating Events

Gather Town isn’t just changing our everyday working life, but it is also changing the way we interact with game companies. Since social events have not been a viable option for most companies to showcase their latest products, Gather has been a great substitute for launch events.

The biggest event we’ve covered through Gather was Magic: The Gathering’s Adventures in the Forgotten Realms event. Through Gather Town, the team at Wizards of the Coast showed members of their community never-before-seen cards exclusive to this card set.

Since this new set is a crossover with Dungeons & Dragons, the Gather space they created simulated a D&D campaign, complete with NPCs, puzzles to solve, and hidden treasures for members of the media to discover.

Social Space

So what about the regular users of Gather Town? How has this app changed the way a regular office worker work from home as well as the way one socialises with their friends?

To find out, we reached out to Faye, a writer at Vulcan Post, and Imran, who uses Gather Town to hang out with his friends.

How did you find out about Gather Town?

Imran: A friend of mine introduced me to it!

Faye: One of my colleagues from Vulcan Post found it actually, and she and my boss tried it out, made an office, and later invited all of us in. I basically knew about it on the day a virtual office was made for me and my team.

When did you and your friends/colleagues started using Gather Town and why?

Imran: Because of my friend’s introduction, our friend group of four came together to give it a shot – we thought it’d be fun to set up our own customized personal spaces online and perhaps use Gather as a spot to chill together.

Faye: We started on June 10. We've actually been working from home since October last year, so every now and then we'd try to find virtual games and the like to stay connected but in a fun way. And when we chanced upon Gather Town, we realised that it was quite fun being able to interact with one another with an avatar and have a virtual office instead of having to use Discord and our work platform, Lark, to communicate.

As for my friends, it was a few weeks ago but that was quite short-lived because of how much it lagged for all of us. I got them to join because I thought it was quite fun from my experience with my colleagues.

How do you think Gather Town has affected your view towards the pandemic and has it made things easier in terms of hanging out with friends and colleagues?

Imran: In all honesty, my initial experience was less than stellar. Despite having decent internet connections all around, Gather appeared to be quite laggy and difficult to use overall, so we never got past the one-to-two hours of experimenting we did all those days ago. In short, it didn’t serve as anything more than a very brief pastime.

Faye: Quite honestly yes! I think the most fun part about Gather Town is that we can build the office we can never afford and just go ham with it. We recently had an office party so it was fun building a whole room just to have a fancy dinner together. It seems like Gather is quite flexible in terms of planning for occasions because they have the right props for almost every celebration? (although I do feel that they eerily have too many funeral decor)

And the other good thing is that you can input games into the rooms you've created, so everyone can just hang out all day and walk over to a particular place to play a game together instead of having to hit each other up and send links.

However, Gather isn't exactly great for Mac users I feel, because it heats up my laptop easily and another friend of mine who uses a Mac as well. I tried getting my friends to join a Gather Town but it seems to be lagging for them (Mac or not) as well which can get quite frustrating (for some reason it doesn't lag as much for my office). So unfortunately it didn't quite make things easier for us to hang out online, unless someone has a solution to our constant lagging and overheating.

How would you rank Gather Town among Discord, Microsoft Teams and Zoom Calls, why?

Imran: Discord is my first choice for calls because of how reliable it tends to be, on top of offering easy screen-sharing options and customizable servers with fun bots you could add into the mix.

Zoom comes in second – it feels a lot more… professional, I would say? It doesn’t feel like it has a casual interface and feels much more like a piece of business software, but the 40-minute limit for free calls is a turn-off for me.

As for Teams, I never got around to using it for personal calls – I’ve only ever used it as a student where I’d just enter pre-scheduled meetings. I don’t even know how to make a group call with my friends through Teams cause it just seemed too tedious, so I’d just turn to Discord instead.

Faye: Gather Town, simply because the others are so boring! Our office plays games together often so it's helpful that we can have a platform where we can not only work but have fun at the same time! But in terms of practicality I would say our current work platform, Lark, would rank higher than Gather Town just because it has a lot of functions that are helpful for professionals to work with, and its video/voice calls are smoother as well.

What kind of activities have you tried doing in Gather Town?

Imran: During our initial run, my friends and I spent some time just decorating our own so-called spaces. Unfortunately, the novelty of it all dissipated quickly, because of the lag and unresponsiveness of the software. I found it particularly difficult to upload my own logos as the tiling and furniture editing function was just too flimsy.

Going forward, I think it’d be fun to give it another go once the software stabilizes – the idea of walking into my friend’s room, midway through work, does seem pretty fun and it’d be neat to explore it further.

Faye: Our fancy dinner (as mentioned), and every day the writers will come together to do a reading session every day in our little couch corner. As for games, we've tried Sudoku and Skribbl but we don't play as much. Besides that, we have meetings and weekly virtual office lunches there once in a while!

If you want to open up your own virtual space, try it out over on Gather Town’s website.