VR Chat: The human mind unleashed, for better or worse.

By Maverick

"VR as a whole is a new medium that trascends the likes of music and film"
"it (VR) could be capable of changing our entire view of our world and the rules it follows"

VR Chat is a multiplayer social "game" that as its name indicates is mostly about virtual reality (Yes, you can play it as you would any other pc game but honestly who does that?!). Like the social game it is it allows people to express themselves, in this case, to an absurd degree. Its customization and modability have made it one of the most important games in the vr scene since forever. VR Chat was one of the first vr games ever made and it has stayed relevant even though it has been around for almost 10 years. Anyways, back on the earlier point of complete freedom to the user the game allows for 2 types of customization (There are more, this is putting it in lamest terms): Worlds and avatars. Worlds are the actual space you visit while in your digital dream and they are relatively easy to make and publish as they don't really require any game development skills or even 3D modelling as you can just take some off the web (as long as they are copyright-free of course) and it will work out rather well. Worlds are very distinct from one another as they can really be anything, my favourite world as of now is between "Murders 4" a mystery and social deduction game which is fun to interact with people on and "Zombie karts" (not the exact name of the world I haven't visited in a while...) where you are in a racing kart and must infect or avoid other players by bumping them with your kart, it is specially fun as it has a tight-knit community and has an atmosphere similar to that of pre-2016 TF2 and the game itself is on the funner side as it lets you perform stunts and other cool maneauvers. These worlds however stray away from what is trully popular in VR Chat, as what is most visited by people in this game are worlds that don't actually present any gameplay at all, they are simply places to meet and interact with people and it is rather interesting how this came to be as for what I can remember this only began happening around 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time of instability and incertainty, as well as the rapid growth of the vr market, 2 factors which contributed to a growth in playerbase for all vr games and as the outside world was burning most people decided to take their time in a world absent of viruses and bad news after bad news. VR Chat acted like a refuge for most of these people, for better or for worse. Tangents aside, avatars are the other way you can make yourself trully yours. Avatars are hard to make, compared to worlds at the very least, but they add so much to one's personality that it becomes uncanny. If you have the know-how you could theoretically make an avatar out of anything and feel like you are capable of trully becoming anything. This is all fine and dandy but it brings up questions in people with doubts, like myself, about their own identities in the real world, outside of the electronic storm we call an escape. People who earlier didn't give too much attention to the current gender revolution turned over months of playing VR Chat into phacets of themselves they hadn't met yet. I theorise the surge in trans people and culture is partly due to this, people who felt weird in their body but couldn't quite put their finger on it were now shown an answer, one of being what you trully felt like you were, and that is what makes VR Chat special. It is proof that when the human mind is left to its own devices it can create worlds and figure things out it didn't even know it could nor should.

Virtual Reality as whole is a new medium that trascends the likes of music and film. If it is treated correctly we could get fully immersive, touch-sensitive, wireless and cheap aparata that would allow us, a race of glorified bald gorillas, to enter a new age and a new world, unbound from the laws of the universe itself. Of course, hitting a wall while playing beat saber is still going to happen no matter how much play space you have got but think of the possibilities. If full-on immersion is around the corner like people say it is, it could be capable of changing our entire view of our world and the rules it follows.