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Within moments of opening Cursor Camp, laughter erupts out of me like the clumsy bark of a circus seal as I do something I’ve done hundreds of times before—wiggle my mouse cursor back and forth in time to a song I’m listening to—because someone else on screen has followed my lead. According to the flag by their cursor, they’re in India. We’ll probably never see or speak to each other for the rest of our lives, but this ghost of an interaction is a minuscule joy we can share from thousands of miles away.
These are the sorts of things that get me all weepy about games like Journey and even Club Penguin, the latter of which Cursor Camp reminds me of in the best way possible. It’s by Neal Agarwal, the browser game developer behind oddities like Infinite Craft and The Password Game. My first impression suggests that Cursor Camp isn’t as surprising or ambitious as Infinite Craft, but it offers a kind of experience I crave and is extremely hard to find these days.
It is, to my eye, a browser-based social MMO like Club Penguin or Habbo Hotel, but without the text chat capabilities and few traditional ‘game-y’ elements. Instead, you interact with other players by sharing little moments—explore the camp by waving your mouse around, pick up a stick of marshmallows to roast smores, watch movies like 12 Angry Men on a projector screen, listen to music as it blares from a DJ setup, and so on. There’s even a soccer field (football pitch?) where you can kick a ball around and quaff orange slices to move faster.
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