❚ VRChat

Why I never touch grass

VRChat is a virtual reality socialization platform where people can explore worlds and use avatars made by other users, this platform has been around 2014 for VR and PC but it picked up popularity around the time it entered the Steam Shop, in 2017.

On my experience, I personally can’t remember how I came across this platform, I suspect I watched a video about people meme'ing around and got curious of it, that was in June of 2018 (according to the confirmation email I still keep).

It took me a couple of weeks to stop being so scared to open my mouth in public instances, surrounded by other “people” (and is not like I’m a heavily socially anxious individual or a big introvert) I would just tremble when interacting with anyone, an irrational fear of being judged by my existence alone or the sound of my voice, the beginning was wild overall.

VRChat has been (and still is) a hit or miss place, the learning curve of their User interface, figuring where to meet people and dealing with the obnoxious ones, can be overwhelming, these last years has gotten more complicated as they integrated use with Oculus Quest (a standalone headset model), which brought and unbearable influx of minors (as it seems to be a popular gift on holiday season to kids and tweens) in what is considered a non-child friendly place, and the last year the development team released a new version of the client using EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat Engine), rendering all of our mods unusable, mods that most of the time where for Quality of Life features and optimization options, while the team has doubled their efforts to bring the client to the standard the audience has been wanting for years, it feels lackluster still.

When the wonder wears off, you find yourself in some enhanced version of what Worlds Away/Second Life tried to brought to the masses back in their time, unlike those two titles where you they had a more friendly method of making your own content on it, as this time where this article is being written, VRChat will instead ask you to learn Unity Engine and their in-house library Udon, while you can get around with free assets and free-to-edit models, Udon is no easy task to get familiar as you’re figuring out interactive features of a world or your own avatar as you are making whole videogame, if you wanna get more detailed with models and assets them you will throw to that list 3D modelling, so, for a good while, the VRChat user collective employed pirated content from both videogames and other 3D content communites such as MMD/MikuMikuDance (mostly hosted between BowlRoll and DeviantArt) of course this led to MikuMikuDance userbase put a new rule on their post “Prohibited use for VRChat” and/or making the assets only available for people inside the community, damaged done aside, these assets models where a segway for people to make themselves comfortable tinkering around with 3D works and eventually moving to their own creations (but piracy is still going rampage).

Because the platform doesn’t endorse but neither moderates heavily (at first) the content uploaded from users, you could find almost everything you could think of, from content of the latest popular shows and games to classic works from media/videogames, looking and favoriting an avatar based on your fave game or show is the common practice, specially with the now defunct avatar searching mods that were integrated with your menu, with EAC these were taken away but the userbase figured a way to query the api from inside a vrchat world and created avatar search world (which is still against tos of course).

Maps are in the same alley as avatars, people have brought very original ideas, some rooted in already existing concepts (Kart racing, Flight Sims, Escape rooms), replicas of existing games (Monkey Ball, Among Us, PowerWash Simulator) to entire dumps worlds with their assets of commercial games, not all playable, but overall functional, outside of this group of worlds aimed at games, a great percentage of these are made with the goal of hanging out and replicating public places for socialization, such as pubs, bars, music clubs, big mansions meant for parties, hotels, to places which are ethereal, surrealist, dream-like places that evoke either nostalgia or calm, with the goal to let you unwind of your everyday life.

What other place received a lot of players during those years was something called Gaia Night, it was a very simple valley with some tables, campfire, some props to throw around and some free assets of the unity store like trees and rocks, people would gather around the campfire to meet strangers or go to the hills to meet up with their friends, around that time I personally made some friendships already and my routine was meet up with them either in Leblanc, Gaia Night or The Great Pug, at one point this place would lag me out for no reason, not sure if it was as a result of people having too many complex avatars or my computer giving up on me (at that time I had a Dual-Core CPU with it’s integrated GPU, oh boy… ) and most likely it was both.

Following that last paragraph, VRChat made me upgrade my entire hardware just to keep up with the platform’s requirements (which are totally dependent on the people’s content’s own requirements), I moved from a Dual-Core with no GPU to a i5 4th gen and a GTX1050, to as of this as of the time this article is being written, a Ryzen 5 3600 and a 3060, I went from a standard microphone to a Steelseries headset to a arm-type professional-ish model, the first upgrades where a day and night change, not only because of the improvement on performance but because I had no proper income, I got the money from birthdays and one-time jobs and felt as a big step towards quality of life managing to afford them, now I work and live on my own, and upgrading PC parts is something I do maybe once a year, but what about a VR Headset?. The available models when I started looking into them were expensive as hell and nightmarish to even think how to import them, only in the last 2 years I started saving for one, and it looks like it won’t have one for at least another year, but at this point I don’t care whether I have one or not, I would like to have hands so people can see my body language and understand me better but is not essential, I try not to imagine how things could change by having one because I might end up disappointed of it, but nonetheless I’ll acquire one.

VRChat is still my one place to be when I want to socialize, I have come and gone in waves following changes in my live and priorities, and so, this page will remain open to re-edit as many might come with experiences to write here.