STFU! | A Playful Misuse of the Jitsi Meeting Space

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By Simran Duggal, Krishnokoli (Koli) Roy Chakraborty, Patricia (Trish) Kanana Mwenda, and Candide Uyanze

The following blog post documents coursework assigned as part of the course DIGF 6041 - Experiences & Interfaces (Summer 2021) taught by Ashley Lewis at OCAD University. For this assignment, we were tasked with designing the playful misuse of a meeting space. Read on to learn more about STFU!

Description of Experience

“STFU” is a playful misuse of the virtual meeting platform Jitsi Meet.

Jitsi Meet is a free and open-source multiplatform VoIP, video conferencing, and instant messaging application for web, Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS and Android. In addition to audio and video, screen sharing is available, and new members can be invited via a generated link. The interface is accessible via web browser or with a mobile app, and sign-in is not required. Like other VoIP, and video conferencing applications, Jitsi allows users to mute themselves and other participants, and turn off their videos as well. Jitsi also offers additional functionalities not present in Zoom and other popular platforms such as:

• stats on the amount of time each participant has spoken for, and
• the ability for anyone to mute everyone.

Our concept for this playful misuse came from studying patterns of using various meeting platforms. As most of our social lives in the past year have been on online meeting platforms, most of us have developed collective, unspoken norms surrounding these platforms. This often involves, turning our microphones and/or cameras off to maintain our privacy. The audio-visual, tactile, and olfactory presence while meeting someone in person became unnecessary in these virtual spaces. Letter initials and display pictures have become the new proof of presence.

We began to think of ways of counteracting this inclination to not be perceived. What if the goal was to be heard, to be loud, to remain unmuted? What if we could tap into everyone’s competitive nature to encourage participation? After many lengthy brainstorming sessions, “STFU” was conceived.

In this experience, participants are urged to keep their microphone on and talk, breaking the cold grey silence of internet meeting platforms. Participants must strategically juggle between remaining unmuted, keeping score of the speaker stats, silencing others, and being loud enough to have their speaker stats accounted for.

 “STFU” is a game experience where loudness, chatter, unruliness, and the spirit of friendly competition rule.

Background

Intention

The pandemic has brought on a new age of the always on(line) meeting space. This new space is virtual, and after a year of reliance on virtual meeting spaces for school, work, socializing, workshops, etc., we are tired of our screens! The lack of physical interaction has led to the monotony of our everyday experiences.

In as much as virtual meeting spaces are the new normal, they have become uncomfortable terrains of navigating personal and private space:

• Once upon a time when we met in person, classrooms were typically designed to face one person. It was much easier to be blend into the crowd. To see other people’s faces, you would have to physically turn around or move, and weren’t constantly aware of what your face was doing.
• These days, in online meeting spaces like Zoom, we can see ourselves as well as each other participants faces all the time, providing an uncomfortable panopticon experience where you feel like you are constantly under surveillance.

As such, many of us prefer to remain muted, keep our cameras turned off, and be incognito. The intended purpose of “STFU” is to shift people's perspectives about their meeting spaces by leaning into this sense of discomfort and using competitiveness and play to encourage people to act in ways that go against their instincts.

The goal of “STFU” is to bring attention to yourself, to unmute yourself, to be chatty, to be heard, to be noticed, and to compete for everyone's attention. This then breaks free from the polite monotony of typical virtual meetings, where we wait our turn, mute ourselves, and politely ask others to mute themselves if they are being disruptive. Instead, the goal is to be disruptive, interrupt each other, and mute others without asking for permission.

One is also faced with the dilemma of deciding whether they are more focused on silencing others or un-silencing themselves. The game fosters healthy competitiveness, cheekiness, and strategy as part of the experience. Participants are also left with a lessened feeling of inhibition and become more chattier in the process. The idea is to encourage participants to speak with the incentive of being rewarded for speaking, as opposed to shaming people into speaking and participating. As online meetings sometimes tend to be awkward, “STFU” loosens people up and gets them out of their comfort zone -- that is why competitive games make for great ice breakers!

Inspiration

Our primary inspirations came from Suzanne Stein and Emma Westecott. As professors of the courses Creative Techniques and Digital Games, respectively, they assigned assignments which encouraged us to consider how we could tap into each person's competitive nature to foster playfulness and disinhibition. One of Professor Westecott’s readings, “Designing for the Pleasures of Disputation – or – How to make friends by trying to kick them!” by Douglas Wilson detailed a physical game developed by Wilson called Johann Sebastian Joust, in which the central task of players is to keep their motion controller sufficiently still.

The game’s ambiguous rules and the tiresome nature of holding something still meant that players often resorted to slowly approaching one another to try to make their opponents lose. Wilson observed a wide variety of tactics including pushing opponents, hitting their controllers, and baiting them into moving too much. Wilson’s game inspired us to create something equally simple yet chaotic, with a multitude of possible strategies to win.

Ideas Generated during Brainstorming Sessions:

• Musical chairs
• Blurring yourself instead of your background
• Speeding things up, slowing things down
• Guessing game
• Lip-reading on mute
• Passive-aggressive zoom meeting
• Using Zoom to anger people
• Misuse of scheduling apps
• Green screen backgrounds: Everyone would make their backgrounds green, and we would livestream the meeting via OBS Studio. In OBS, we would chroma key the green to replace it with a video
• Muting other people game

Pre-Event Plan

Communications sent in advance to the class

We will share the following meeting link with the class ahead of time: https://meet.jit.si/STFU-playful-misuse

Materials needed

• Device with Internet access to access Jitsi Meet
• Game Guidelines slide deck
• Timer
• Prompts/topics

Schedule of events

1. The hosts create a meeting in Jitsi and share the link.
2. Once participants have joined, the hosts explain the game using the slide deck (5 mins).
3. The hosts will send prompts in the chat.
4. The hosts will set a timer for 5 or 10 mins.
5. The game will begin.
6. After 5 mins, a winner is declared by checking the speaker stats on Jitsi.
7. The hosts will debrief will the group, gather some feedback, and answer any questions (5 mins).

Dry Run Test

The feedback we received from our friend, Clinton, was to give prompts to participants so that they have something to talk about. This feedback was implemented in our next iteration, where prompts were delivered every minute.

Post-event reflection

by Candide

“STFU!” is a playful misuse of Jitsi Meet where loudness, chatter, unruliness, and the spirit of friendly competition rule.

The final concept is a combination of ideas generated during a series of brainstorming sessions between Simran, Krishnokoli (Koli), Patricia (Trish), and me.

Goals

The intended purpose of “STFU!” is to lean into the discomfort of online meeting spaces and using competitiveness and play to encourage people to act in ways that go against their instincts.

As a participant of “STFU!”, you want to bring attention to yourself, unmute yourself, be chatty, be heard, be noticed, and compete for everyone's attention. This breaks free from the polite monotony of typical virtual meetings, where we wait our turn, mute ourselves, apologize for interrupting people, and politely ask others to mute themselves if they are being disruptive. Instead, the goal is to disrupt, interrupt, and mute others without asking for permission.

Participants are also faced with the dilemma of deciding whether they are more focused on silencing others or un-silencing themselves. The game fosters healthy competitiveness, cheekiness, and strategy as part of the experience.

We hope that participants are left with a lessened feeling of inhibition and become chattier in the process. The idea is to encourage participants to speak with the incentive of being rewarded for speaking, as opposed to shaming people into speaking and participating. As online meetings sometimes tend to be awkward, “STFU!” loosens people up and gets them out of their comfort zone.

Expectations

My teammates and I were very nervous about how the game would be received.

What if no one participates?

What if the instructions aren’t clear enough?

What if the prof HATES it???

We were even hesitant to proceed with the game’s name because it contained a swear word. Ultimately, we felt like it fit the daring nature of the experience and kept it.

As the game host, my heart was racing. I had to make sure everyone understood the game, and that critical information on the remaining time, speaker stats, and talking points were delivered.

Outcomes

Our first official run of the experience went much better than we anticipated. We received a fantastic response from our classmates, and we were excited to witness such enthusiastic participation from our peers.

Jitsi proved to be the perfect platform, as many of our classmates and professor noted. The live stats on speaker times – a feature unique to Jitsi, as far as we know – fostered competition in unique ways. The ability to hear everyone’s overlapping speech at the same time (as we would in real life) added to the fun, confusion, and chaos. This “inverted cross-talk”, as one of our classmates brought “STFU!” to life.

We got to see our classmates as they hesitantly started talking, talked endlessly for the sake of talking, began responding to what others were saying, and eventually formed a conversation.

It was also fascinating to witness the different strategies employed by our classmates to win, whether it was one classmate's exclamations that brought people to pause, the professor's contemplation of kicking the winning person out, or our winner's reading of the news and focus on only unmuting herself (rather than muting others).

Lessons Learned

I learned a lot from conducting this experience with a larger group.

For one, 10 minutes was too long for this activity. By the 7-minute mark, people were getting tired. You could hear our classmates asking how many minutes were left, and expressing that they had run out of things to say.

Another area of improvement was the instructions. In this week’s class, we took some time to discuss the different approaches to delivering instructions. Although, as one of our classmates argued, “front-loading” our instructions made sense for our experience, there was still a moment of hesitation about what to do when the timer started.