A Whole New Virtual World

June 9, 2020
by Bethany

Life Hacks

During this time of social distancing, we’ve learned that it can be difficult to stay in touch with people. Especially as college students, moving away from campus and being back home was quite a transition. And my class’ position as seniors only amplified our experience. We were planning on cramming last minute hang outs together into our final weeks, making the most our proximity, but those weeks never came. However, over time, we began to get creative with the ways that we stayed connected. And even as things slowly open up, there are still some creative ways to stay in touch that we will continue to do.

Zoom Game Night
One of the student organizations I was a part of was Intervarsity Trojan Christian Fellowship. We have a tradition of having Senior Office Hours through the last week for the seniors to hang out with everyone in the fellowship. Organizing these virtually was difficult, but we found a lot of fun games that work over video chat! One of my personal favorites (and one at which I am unfortunately not that great) is Codenames. In Codenames, you work with your team to help them make the correct selections on a grid of 25 random words by using only one word clues.

Skribbl.io is an online version of pictionary that has one player draw at a time while the others type in guesses. It is even more fun to add the element of video chat to watch everyone’s reactions to the others’ drawings, sometimes bemoaning their own artistic ability. Be careful, though: Spelling counts on this game! Although the program will let you know when your answer is close, you still have to spell it correctly for the answer to go through. One word given was Colosseum, and although the participant drew a beautiful rendition, her audience unfortunately consisted of USC seniors, who were all too familiar with the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where our football team plays every home game. Watching the numerous attempts and re-attempts at spelling was frustrating, but garnered laughs all the same.

You can find many more games here, on a list compiled by another socially-distancing college student. The list is even organized by type of game, from board games to card games and even escape rooms! The author is ever updating the list, so if you have site recommendations, you can send them her way through the link on the document. You’ll find some old favorites, but I highly recommend trying something new, too! I learned Settlers of Catan through the online version, a challenging but overall fun experience.

Team Challenges
My family has taken this time to keep in touch with extended family members as well. Through Marco Polo, a video messaging app, each group of cousins takes turns challenging the other families to post a video in the group. The first challenge was a family dance challenge, where each family choreographed and performed a 30+ second clip. Then we sent the videos to our grandparents, and they came up with their own categories of choreography, enthusiasm, costuming, and more to rank each performance. I’m proud to say that my family got top marks for enthusiasm when the dog showed up wearing sunglasses for the opening. We’ve also done challenges for mimicking old family photos, recreating a movie scene, and re-writing the lyrics to a song to reflect our social distancing experiences. The challenges are a great way to stay in touch, keep younger cousins busy, and see everyone’s creative side!

Start A Series
Now that we know that many of our gatherings will continue online, what better time to start a series with someone. Netflix Party is one app that allows different users to simultaneously watch the same content. If the content is not through Netflix, there is also a screen-share option through video chat. Anything from TV shows to different movie series, Friends to Harry Potter. Having a series is a nice way to keep continuity and to ensure that you regularly stay in touch with your watch group, because you can’t not watch the next installment!

These are only a few examples of the many ways we’ve learned to keep in touch as the world changes. And even in the future, as things open back up, I look forward to continuing to use these strategies to maintain relationships. Hopefully, you can take advantage of some of these suggestions or come up with some creative ones of your own!

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