Meta Horizon Worlds Spotlight: Affinity Forest

Welcome back to our weekly spotlight on the people building for Meta Horizon Worlds and their amazing creations.

Through the last week of the year, we’re shining the spotlight on the Worlds creators who won The Game Awards Future Class competition: Team N0M4DVR, Team MsMust, and Team Cthunicorn.

Last week, we put on our stirrups and cowboy hat and loped into Team N0M4DVR’s Meta Valley, a Wild West town filled with games, challenges, and a main street straight out of a Hollywood movie set.

This week, we wandered into Team MsMust’s Affinity Forest, a place designed to help us meet new people, express ourselves, and be seen by others for who we truly are. And it has plenty of fun things to talk about to jump start the conversation.

For lots of us, meeting new people is hard—sometimes even scary. We struggle to know what to say to someone we don’t know, and that can lead to many missed opportunities.

But we’re social animals—we like talking to other people. Sometimes we just need a little assistance to break the ice.

Affinity Forest from Team MsMust is a lovely little world full of things designed to help us push through our shyness and give us easy openings to introduce ourselves.

To start with, you can choose to put on a label—that happens to look like a cat—to express exactly how social you’re feeling. So people will know at a glance if you’re ready to talk, a little nervous but still open to chatting, or are simply there to explore the beauty of the forest on your own.

If you like, you can also put on one of six pronoun tags, which can also be a great prompt for starting to talk to someone new.

And then you enter the forest itself. There’s a conversation treehouse, a way to “fly” to the moon to check out the amazing view from the sky, a gorgeous little river, giant mushrooms, and even a big smiling cat.

All of these are the kinds of things that could make it easy to walk up to a stranger and, respectfully, ask how they’re doing and what they think about the surroundings.

When you enter Affinity Forest, you’re greeted with some signs that gently make it clear that this is a world meant to be an “inclusive, safe, and comfortable space.” Visitors are asked to be kind, to respect others’ boundaries, and to go into every conversation with the intent to “learn and improve our behavior.”

If you do, you’ll get a chance to spend some time with people who are happy to meet you, and before you know it, you may even have a new friend.