What I miss most about life before the pandemic is hovering on the edge of conversation, waiting for the moment to make the perfect one-liner. Big sigh.

Zoom meetings, Discord servers, and Google Hangouts are not the same, so coding collective Siempre has created a web utility that mimics the real thing quite nicely. Online Town is a videoconferencing tool that combines the usual webcam and microphone setup with a top-down JRPG-style room where all participants are assigned a small sprite that they can move around freely. The clarity of the webcam and the volume of the microphone increase or decrease depending on how close all participants' sprites are.

Top: Siempre shows me how Online Town works.

I can still hover on the edge of the conversation, the webcam is grayed out on touch so I am completely unrecognizable, and the microphone output is small enough that not only will my jokes be missed, but also unheard or misunderstood once I pull the ripcord . Relieved.

But if you know how to actually have a conversation, online towns seem like a great way to interact with remote friends. I use services like Houseparty and Zoom a lot, but the more people in a room, the less spontaneous the conversation. Every large meeting I've ever attended has been stuffy and awkward, dominated by Whats, I'll-waits, and Sorry-Go-aheads.

Online towns offer an easy way to break up and parse such large social gatherings. Sprites cannot be customized, and in the flat, featureless scenes, there is little to do but chat. A few custom scenes and a few simple games would help to separate people and create a kind of flow between groups. But what is there works well enough to hold together a crowded online gathering without the usual barrage of crosstalk.