Idyll is a gentle social world from the creator of Library of Babble.

For now, Idyll exists for me as a few notes in my diary - things I read, bottles I opened. It's kind of similar to the way a distant holiday might live on in the form of pictures on my phone's camera reel. Reading back through the notes now, a surprising amount of the experience returns to me - how I felt, how I slowly learned to get my bearings, how natural so much of it seemed.

Idyll is a small social world created by Demi Schänzel, a researcher and game designer from Aotearoa (New Zealand), who advocates for "compassionate design practices and digital kindness." I'm going to call it a game in this piece, but that, and any other label I can think of, is probably a bit misleading. I played and loved Schänzel's earlier social space, Library of Babbel, which transported me to a landscape of curvy and abstracted topography, in which so much of the quiet thrill came from wandering and working out what to write when prompted.

Schänzel's new game takes a similar idea but - to me at least - opens it out. It feels to me that we have the real landscape now, rather than a glimpse of it accessed through some kind of digital approximation. When I play, I first type my name, and then find myself moving over an island in a gentle sea. There is a sense of grass, so thick it might feel like fur, and sand beneath it, and the island itself is made of hills as rounded as the watercolour Downs in a Ravilious painting.

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