People Love Pillowforts
May 18, 2022 9:39 AM   Subscribe

PMG: Making Sense of VRchat, the 'Metaverse' people actually like. An excellent overview on VRChat, what makes it work, its pitfalls, and what makes it so appealing in comparison to the type of environment Meta/Facebook envisions.
posted by Philipschall (13 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Really fascinating but I guess what bugs me is that knowledge that VRChat is going to get bought out because someone like Murk or Zurk is going to unroll like $100B on a table and I don't know if there are ten people in the world who could resist that. I'm not sure I'm one of them either.

And then, like, all those unmoderated, beautiful, horrible spaces, some of them made by people who died ... do they just dry up and blow away in favour of yet another mall?

There's so many questions about what it means to exist and what it means to be when in VR. And then throw corporations into the mix. It's not comforting.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:50 AM on May 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


Real shades of My Tiny Life / LambdaMOO throughout. That’s ancient of course, and there have been stories about Second Life and everything, but… the sex, the costumes, the “be anything” vibe, the “make anything” vibe, the people being wildly inappropriate in the wrong contexts: it all tracks. Everything old is new again, but with better resolution, and VR 1.0 is gonna become some kind of VR 2.0 eventually.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:02 PM on May 18, 2022


In the best of all universes, VRChat would end up like IRC. No corporate anything attached, people make servers and populate them as they wish, and people join whatever space they want to be in.
posted by hippybear at 3:10 PM on May 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


Existence, er sry...

Metafilter: throw corporations into the mix. It's not comforting
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 3:14 PM on May 18, 2022


I would really love to hear from some Second Lifers how they feel about VRChat. That video looked extremely similar to those hangouts.
posted by emjaybee at 4:30 PM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


The furries are having a heyday with VRChat. In fact, shortly after the whole Four Seasons debacle, a furry made the Four Seasons Total Landscaping facade from the press conference as a hangout space and ended up getting written about in the press about it [Buzzfeed].
posted by hippybear at 4:41 PM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


I would really love to hear from some Second Lifers how they feel about VRChat. That video looked extremely similar to those hangouts.

It was also interesting to hear Quinns gripping about meta wanting you to sell things, when that was a big part of second life and also appears to be a big part of VRChat. I can understand being mad at Facebook wanting a gigantic piece of the pie, but people want to be pretty and have nice spaces.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:25 PM on May 18, 2022


How is any of this a shock? Have you never read history? Met a Khan?
posted by metametamind at 6:41 PM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


This video was right up my alley, as I am currently directing season 2 of a documentary series about the history, player culture, and preservation of extremely long-running virtual worlds (Preserving Worlds, please excuse the self-link). I've really been enjoying the videos People Make Games have been putting out on the subject lately. They're coming at things from more of a journalist standpoint, while I'm trying to make something more in an art-documentary mode. But their Roblox videos actually saved me a lot of time and grief.

For a little while my co-creator and I were planning on doing a Roblox episode for this upcoming season. We were curious about virtual worlds made for children -- what kind of player culture arises when the vast majority of users are unsupervised kids? What risks are inherent in this, but also are there benefits (maybe in socialization and development of independence)? Around the time we were looking for guests, People Make Games put out their second Roblox video, and I happened to watch both. I was already aware that Roblox had ethical issues, but those videos dived deeper into those issues than anything else I'd seen. They made me aware that the platform was so deeply ethically compromised that our show's format would not be well-suited to the subject matter. We're interested in the poetry of virtual worlds, the human connections that form there, the ways the software's design and affordances influence peoples' interactions within them, and the lasting impact they have on peoples' lives. We're willing to be critical of the worlds we cover (our Second Life episode is not exactly laudatory), but Roblox is evil. To cover it responsibly would require us to dramatically shift the focus and tone of our show, so we abandoned the episode. I am very grateful to People Make Games for making us aware of the darker side of the software before we dove headlong into it and discovered just how depraved it is ourselves, potentially deep into production.

This new VR Chat video is brilliant. I especially appreciated its exploration of gender identity and sexuality in VR Chat. The discussion of cis men getting drawn further into inhabiting their female avatars than they initially expected, and the stories of genderfucked hookups, that is an angle I've never really seen explored in this way, and it's deeply compelling.

They also make a great point about the current VR landscape resembling the wild west of the early world wide web. My co-creator and I don't have VR headsets and they're too expensive for our production's budget, which is pretty much entirely why we're not covering VR Chat, but this video really made me want to pick one up with my own money. I want to experience social VR as it exists today, before the really big money moves in and reshapes it.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 7:32 PM on May 18, 2022 [8 favorites]


Thinking about the video again, the most surprising-but-obvious-in hindsight bit is people hanging out in front of mirrors. You want to see your own cool style, of course you’re going to need a mirror.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:44 AM on May 19, 2022


I would really love to hear from some Second Lifers how they feel about VRChat.

Apologies for a slight derail...I've been a little surprised that all the discussions of the current metaverse push usually only go back to Second Life. I remember trying out AlphaWorld (now ActiveWorlds) in 1996 or 1997 on a 56k modem. I wasn't on the cutting edge of anything, just a high school student in the middle of nowhere who heard about it in the lunchroom; it wasn't mainstream, but I don't think it was particularly obscure if I heard about it.

Didn't work great especially over a phone line, but at the time it felt like the future that the internet evangelists had been promising and really not that different from any of these virtual worlds that I've seen since: customizable avatars, chatting, building stuff, private areas, teleporting around, some branded areas (if I remember), and it was a free-reign and weird then as this video shows VRChat to be. I don't know any people who remember it, so my experiences there (really only a couple logins during whatever year that was) feel like a dream.
posted by msbrauer at 6:16 AM on May 19, 2022


It was also interesting to hear Quinns gripping about meta wanting you to sell things, when that was a big part of second life and also appears to be a big part of VRChat.

The difference between VRChat and Second Life is that VRChat itself doesn't sell you the things. They just offer a Unity SDK free to download and tell everyone to go ham.

If you are buying things for VRChat it's from creators through more general digital asset websites like gumroad, or contacting an artist directly and commissioning them to make a custom skin of a model they made. For better or worse, VRChat isn't making you pay to upload things, or taking a cut of people selling models through a store.

Right now, their only monetization that I know of is that users can pay for a subscription which lets users have more favorited avatars and some other things, but, they aren't really pushing the monetization angle hard. Which, from the perspective of profit-motivated people like the Zuckerbergs of the world is really dumb. But is also important to what VRChat has become, and why people are worried that it won't last in its present form.
posted by Zalzidrax at 6:36 AM on May 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


Seems like the best possible answer is for VRChat to open-source their whole stack so people can run that shit on their own servers, while accepting sponsorships/donations to keep developing. But I dunno if the company's run-rate is sustainable with that kind of input. And where does their current funding come from, and what do those investors expect? "We have secured key investment from major partners, allowing us to grow and develop VRChat for the foreseeable future" doesn't fill me with confidence that they'll be operating in the users' best interests for long. All those millions of dollars going in will be wanting tens of millions coming back out. There's too many questions. I don't like it. And their website is very scant on any kind of management / business information. Almost like they don't want you to know who runs it.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:27 AM on May 19, 2022


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