Valentine's Day Drink
Do you remember the feeling, during a break of a lecture walking to the Scintilla Room. Chatting with fellow students and on your way to annoy the board. Entering the Educafé, maybe it’s near 4 o’clock and the Borrel is already setting up the drink for this afternoon. You walk in the Scintilla Room and buy a snack, grab a Scintilla pen, and someone puts on the latest favorite song on q. And you’re standing there, with your bag of chips, in a row, because that’s what fits in the room, and you’re talking about the drink that will start soon. The board members are annoyed, one was just on the phone with some company. Remember that feeling? Do you miss it? Because I do… And luckily I got to experience it partly again during the Valentine’s Day drink of Stellae.
Stellae recreated the educafe in a digital environment, namely Gather. They created the drink rooms, the stairs, the educafe, the balcony with the couch, the Inter-Actief room and even the appendix. It all looked a bit like Habbo Hotel, which is visible in the added pictures. And during the drink you could freely walk around and talk to the people in your near environment. So you could walk with your friends, there was even a feature that you could create a train of people, by automatically following someone.
The fact that you could walk around and only talk to the people that are close to you, made the online drink much more dynamic. Besides that, the numerous features that come with Gather invited us to experiment and fool around a bit. We tried making a long train of people, we tried to enclose people and we tried to reach the cookies in the Inter-Actief room (see the pictures). And if that was not enough entertainment, Stellae organized a beer tasting. The participants had to buy a set of beers that could be enjoyed while present in the online environment. The fun part was that everyone’s go-to store had different stock, so it was a wide variety of beers that were tasted.
However, the most fun part, in my opinion, in the Gather environment was that you could play minigames. There was an option to play Set, 30 seconds, a drawing game, poker and many more. On the couch on the balcony was a TV that played cat videos the whole evening. The drawing game was of course a recipe for some hilarious situations, some attempts of drawing horses are included in this article. The drink was also a possibility to talk to fellow Scintilla members again, because I had not spoken with some in a long time. Since the lectures are online, I only spoke to members of the committees I’m in, and not too much with other Scintilla members. So it was a nice way to catch up again with everybody, while enjoying the creative drawings during the minigames.
Walking around in (a digital version of) a familiar place, together with the other members of Scintilla while enjoying some special beers was a lot of fun. Of course, it will never be as good as a real Scintilla drink, but I had a good time and naturally left the drink much later than I planned…
