Today I was reflecting on how VRChat was very special to me. It enabled me to pursue a lot of feelings and experiences that would otherwise be unattainable. It's also not the greatest thing ever, and is rife with its own flaws and foibles.
I think the first, and most obvious, benefit of VRChat for me was the ability to inhabit a body that felt right.
Being able to occupy a feminine body in VR is a powerful and extremely happy experience for me. Seeing that body in the mirror, having people recognize that body as me, and just being able to exist within a visual sphere that I identify with directly is... Well, I mean, I've spent decades in the wrong body, so you can imagine how being in a more correct one might make me feel. It was really a revelation at the time - Gender Euphoria strong enough to make me realize, "Oh, yes. Okay, this is actually extremely correct" - So much so that I confess I invested heavily in VR equipment. I already had the basics, but full body tracking was something I acquired quickly because it made me feel amazing. Similarly I invested in tweaks to my avatar. The one I was using on VRChat was admittedly a publicly sourced model (With some issues, but that is a topic for another day). However, over time I was able to commission small modifications to make it more personalized. I had plans to further commission a very much "me" avatar that was also a vixen (two, in fact), but in the short term having a genie body of any sort (and a femme body of any sort) just felt therapeutic.
Once I had everything set up, it was really amazing for me. Anyone who ever saw me in VR, probably noticed that I would not stop moving. Swaying my hips felt natural, fun, and looked really appropriate for a genie.
Being in VRChat in a body that made me feel like, well, me, also made me so much more social. Somehow I was more open to talking, felt more at ease at times, and very much wanted to share and interact with more people - Which is rare for me in the meatspace, given my overwhelming social anxiety (I mean, let alone trying to interact with people in meatspace en femme, right?). There were a few nights I passed on VRChat that I would consider some of the highlights of the past two years for me (Admittedly, pandemic living has put that bar pretty low).
The platform is also just a wellspring of phenomenal creativity. The worlds that one can visit, the avatars people make, and the events that people hold in VRChat are just beyond expectation for me. Travel to the ends of the universe, drop yourself into an Unreal Tournament map, sit on the roof of a Hong Kong skyrise while it rains, solve an escape room with friends, check out a recreation of a 1970s track home that was designed with original blueprints, play ping pong, or even learn to belly dance. I was continually surprised at what was made, and what was available.
So VRChat is all awesome, right? I love it and recommend it and everything is supremely good?
Eh, not so much.
One of the primary issues I ran into while on VRChat was that, despite being a social platform, at times it felt incredibly antisocial. VRChat is not a game that you can just jump into and have a good time. Indeed, my attempts to go it solo and slide into the game on public worlds was short lived and traumatic (Putting my pronouns in my bio was not a good idea in public places - I was almost immediately on the receiving end of transphobia). But any veteran will tell you that public worlds are to be avoided at all costs. Rather, you should join on friends, go to their private meet ups, and generally stick to events with people who are known quantities to you.
In the beginning that was great. I confess I was dragged into VRChat by a friend to begin with, so having a guide through the virtual world was incredibly welcome and helpful. The issue became that very quickly I was alone. If that friend of mine wasn't around, I didn't have a bridge to the social group, and things were rather lonesome.
Suddenly VRChat became a game of aligning schedules - And any of you who have a TTRPG group can probably attest to how fun that subgame is.
It's more personal in nature, but the biggest thing that really held me back in VRChat was that... I'm really a nothing person. Most folks who were participating on the platform were artists, musicians, creators - otherwise folks who were contributing in some way to the ecosystem there. Me? I was just... there. My lack of any talent, my inability to contribute in any meaningful way - It felt very much like I was intruding in space where I didn't belong, despite any welcoming atmosphere. I was very much just "That one person's friend", and there wasn't much reason for anyone to interact with me.
Also, this is a deeply personal problem on my end, but - Joining people in VRChat always was an anxiety inducing experience for me. Ideally, the platform has settings to communicate any user's willingness to be joined at any time. People can broadcast "Yes, please come share in our experience!" or "Please ask beforehand" or "Hey, I'm kinda busy right now". Users are intended to leverage those signals plainly - But I always had this notion of "I can't join these people, they barely know me!" and so I never joined, and so no one ever knew me. Some real world anxieties translate readily into VR, it turns out.
At this point I haven't actually logged into VRChat in months. However, it's certainly not because of anything I mentioned above. On the contrary, it has been because of a deeply stupid, entirely personal misgiving that's emerged on the platform.
Back at the beginning of August, the developers of VRChat effectively ambush updated the game, and in so doing, pushed an installation of notorious program Easy Anti-Cheat to every user. The immediate backlash to this change from the community came on the back of the update effectively killing third party mods - But the devs won back community trust by implementing the functionality of those mods as native features. Within a week, people had forgotten EAC, and everyone had moved on.
But EAC strikes me as a deeply risky piece of software. It professes to spy on you, tells you outright that it will do this, and then says "Hey we pinky promise we'll never do anything bad with that information!" - Which is like... Why should I trust that at all? (Aside: How do you get people to install malware on their computer willingly? Bake it into a game or mod, and then just tell them it's a false positive when it sets off their security software. Most people will trust anything in this realm). My distrust of EAC has remained a personal and, honestly, probably foolish decision. But I just can't bring myself to let that stuff onto my computer, knowing what permissions I'm granting it.
Of course, the only one who suffers because of this is me. I had access to a body that I really liked, and made me feel right, feel happy, and feel like me. I had access to social situations and activities - things that I am currently unable to reach even in meatspace for various reasons. And I just cut myself off from all that, because I'm sketched out by the software that would be required to access it.
I guess that's some cyberfuture dystopia stuff, if nothing else.
VRChat is still going strong, still a creative wellspring, and still a social hub of interesting and artistic people. It's also not terribly accessible - But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it is succeeding wildly where Zuck is failing, and that's pretty funny to me.
Anyhow, this was largely an excuse to vent a bit because I'm sad I haven't been able to have a genie body in months. If you read along this far, thank you <3
