文章探讨了如何通过虚拟“聚会石”促进线下社交互动。作者借鉴了《魔兽世界》中的组队机制，设想在会议或活动中创建一个虚拟平台，让参与者能够轻松找到并加入小组，从而解决社交难题。通过点击“寻找小组”按钮，系统将参与者随机分配到指定地点，促进面对面的交流。文章还讨论了小组规模、应用场景以及潜在的实施方式，旨在优化社交体验。

👥 作者受到《魔兽世界》游戏启发，游戏中的“聚会石”系统允许玩家组队完成地下城任务，从而引发了对线下社交的思考。

🖱️ 作者设想在WriteHaven等平台或会议活动中引入虚拟“聚会石”功能。用户点击“寻找小组”后，系统会自动匹配，并随机分配到特定地点进行面对面交流。

📍 这种虚拟“聚会石”的功能可以应用于各种线下社交场合，例如会议、展览等，通过随机匹配和定向引导，创造更轻松的社交环境。

Published on June 8, 2025 1:01 AM GMT

Back in the mists of time, there was this game called World of Warcraft, where you and your four closest friends would team up to complete dungeons together. To handle the inevitable people with no friends, they added meeting stones near each dungeon. When you clicked a meeting stone, it added you to a queue, and once five people were in the queue, you would all be added to a group together.

I was thinking abut this at LessOnline last week, since I don't have any friends sometimes had trouble finding groups of people to talk to. One way to handle this was to walk up to an existing group and talk to them, but this was tricky since sometimes all of the existing groups were 4+ people already. My strategy ended up being to sit on an empty couch in the busiest areas and wait for people to come to me, but sometimes there were no empty couches in the busy areas.

This made me wish we had some (virtual) meeting stones:

On WriteHaven, you click "Looking For Group".Three^[1] additional people click "Looking For Group".WriteHaven notifies me that a group has been formed and gives me a randomly-selected location^[2] that I've been summoned to.

This could also potentially be a non-WriteHaven app, and I'm tempted to just write it myself, but it would only really be useful if everyone at a conference was aware of it.

What do you all think?

1. ^{^}

   The ideal conversation size might be smaller than four, but groups of two can lead to being matched with one other person who you don't actually end up liking, and not having an non-awkward way to extract yourself.

2. ^{^}

   The conference organizers can setup a list of locations to randomly select from, like "The fire table near the Diagonal Hall".

Discuss