A lot of people are working remotely for the first time and it can lead to a feeling of isolation and having no social bond with the team.
While we are solving for the larger problem by building games teams can play together within Slack with our product called Bored, this is our attempt to bring some fun and banter to everyday standups on Zoom.
There are 30 different icebreaker backgrounds, one for each day of the month. The scrum master puts up a new one everyday and everyone answers the question on it for some good old banter.
I was building a social gaming destination which tanked.
The idea was to have a bunch of games (casual + social/party) and a bunch of friends in one single place. And also have all the banter that happens around these games, especially the social/party games, in the same place. So even if you are not in the mood to actively play, you can just participate in the banter which is also great fun. Better than commenting on photos, at least.
While the gaming destination as a whole did not work out, people enjoyed playing the social/party games we built and they led to a lot of banter.
So when we were trying to figure what next, we thought why not bring that banter to the workplace? While remote work is great, a lot of the team bonding/camaraderie that happens through random chitchat is really missing. And we thought social games are a great way for teams to socialize and build camaraderie.
So here we are. Bored brings social games to right where you work - Slack.
Yes, please go ahead use it in the talk, upload on YouTube and use it wherever else you want :)