Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

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Andy Baio on Skittish, His Charming New Animal Crossing-esque Space for Online Events and Collaborative Creators

Skittish is "a playful virtual space for online events" now in closed beta, the brainchild of beloved tech veteran Andy Baio, a longtime advocate of Internet-driven creativity. As the video teaser above suggests, it combines the whimsical charm of online games like Animal Crossing, with video sharing and other features associated with platforms like Zoom, along with virtual world-type user creation tools and spatial audio chat.

As Andy explains on his blog, it's his bid to create a new kind of virtual event platform for the pandemic age and beyond, synthesizing the online experiences many of us found joy and relief in during the quarantine:

As depressing as most virtual events were, there were three bright spots of creative experimentation happening over the last year:

  1. Experimental Events. The brilliant MUD-like environment created for Roguelike Celebration and the ongoing series of LIKELIKE events showed how event spaces could draw inspiration from games to great effect.
  2. Proximity Chat. Second Life has supported spatial voice chat for nearly 15 years, but a crop of experimental new platforms started using spatial/positional audio and video to make virtual parties feel more real.
  3. Social Games. Approachable games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Among Us, and Fall Guys were breakout stars of the pandemic, giving us new ways to connect to with friends when we couldn’t be together in person.

There are some amazing projects out there, but I started outlining a hybrid of these ideas: an online event venue for large-scale gatherings that used spatial audio, didn’t assume people were comfortable being on camera, with real-time customization of the space, and built in a 3D engine for a more immersive game-like feel.

Go here to apply to become a beta tester. Andy tells me he and his development team are architecting Skittish to host events with very large concurrencies:

Andy Baio Animal Crossing virtual event space Skittish

"Part of my motivation for announcing last week was to start doing larger beta tests to gauge how it performs, both technically and socially, with large groups," as he puts it. "My ultimate goal is for Skittish to work well with groups as large as 1,000 simultaneous attendees, though I expect most events will be far smaller than that."

Related to this, the adorable cartoon avatars and graphics are meant to encourage socialization:

"An avatar sets expectations for the space you're about to enter: the animals in Skittish are lighthearted and unserious, much closer to Animal Crossing than a Zoom call. I fully expect there are entire categories of events that wouldn't work in a space like this, and that's fine with me.
 
"That's not to say serious conversations and subjects can't be tackled in a space like this. I think they can, but it helps set a tone that gets people to let their guard down and hopefully opens them up to exploring and making more genuine connections than they would in a work or productivity-focused environment."
 
Skittish also enables collaborative online creation, somewhat similar to that in virtual worlds like Minecraft and Second Life:
 
"The editing tools in Skittish are much more simple: placing or moving objects from a library of existing assets. I'd like to give more flexible customization options as time goes on, which may bring importing new objects, but we're keeping things pretty simple for now. 
 
"Also worth noting that Skittish isn't intended to be a persistent multiplayer world: it's designed primarily for events that have a start and an end. The editing tools are primarily designed for the event creator and trusted editors, not all attendees, but we'll leave that up to the event creator to decide."
 
I plan to do a demo of those tools with Andy soon, especially as they're part of his plan to make Skittish a place where creators can host and monetize their works:
I’m intent on making Skittish into something that individual artists and creators can use to bring together their own community, whether it’s debuting a new video on YouTube, doing a book reading, a live concert, or playtesting a new game — and make money doing it. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, get in touch.
Much more here, and more here on Skittish soon.
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