When is it valuable to let one user be in multiple rooms? Is there a technically feasible way to allow that?

[lazerwalker]

@jim-adventureprogames brought up that, if the arcade has a dedicated room for each game, a dev who wants to hang out by their game would be pretty lonely. We can look at other design solutions to solving this specific problem (and it's worth spending time on that!) but one potential solution that might have other use cases is letting people be in multiple rooms at once.

We probably want to make it infeasible to be in too many rooms at once. A design tenant of the space is to encourage more intimate conversations by making individual conversations smaller and more manageable; letting people idle in every room just recreates the dynamic of Discord or Slack that we're actively trying to avoid.

A few potential use cases this would make sense for:

• Someone wants to have a small side conversation while also taking place in the giant chat associated with the live Twitch stream
• Someone wants to ask a speaker a question in the speaker breakout room while the next talk is starting
• The aforementioned arcade example
• Someone is taking part in the LARP or some other game-y part of the space, but also wants to simultaneously have more social conversations

The last one is mostly academic until we know what those things are. Thinking about the arcade as a space and the theatre as a space may be separate design problems.

It's worth thinking about the arcade holistically on its own in a separate thread.

I think letting people be in the theatre and another room at the same time may really help foster conversations during the talks. I'm assuming the theatre chat will mostly be cacophany that's fun but hard to have a 'real' conversation. I also assume people will still want to participate in that, rather than watching Twitch through a separate browser window, because the cacophany will be fun.

How can we implement this?

• The app itself can have two (or more?) separate tabs, each in a different room. This is easy to implement technically (a user is just placed in two rooms at once on the server), but needs some UI design thinking, and breaks the core metaphor of "you are a person physically in the space".
• You want to be in the app multiple times? Make multiple accounts. This is a bad idea :)
• The app allows a user to have multiple browser windows open logged in as the same user. This works well from a UI standpoint, people can do their own window management. From an implementation standpoint, it might not be that bad, depending on whether the SignalR client can let us know what group is getting a message. Basically, each connected client would want to display universal messages (whispers, shouts, etc), but only show room-specific messages scoped to the room you're in. Worst case, this might require refactoring some message infrastructure so the message itself includes what room it was sent from. This will result in extra messages being sent (= more $$$), but I don't think we can fix this on the server-side without ripping apart our authentication infrastructure. This also breaks the core metaphor of the space, but it feels more like the player is choosing to transgress the magic circle, which somehow makes it more okay?

It's more work, but I'd be tempted to use the browser window solution instead. I don't explicitly want to encourage this behavior in the way that building it into the UI does. The browser solution also scales better, and leans on desktop OS interfaces.

[lazerwalker]

I'm broadly of the opinion that (even if our time were infinite) we shouldn't do anything around this until we see how people actually behave at the meetup

[lazerwalker]

We've got another issue to let people have multiple windows open. Slightly concerned about the extra load, but that feels like the right compromise.