Finding Voice
It took me a month to answer the big hurdle to creating a VRChat world of my own. I spent the preceding weeks asking the world dev community I knew a few questions, namely:
What was your first project like, and,
What if you had to start over today?
The replies helped me take cues from VRC's past: its "world jam" prompts! This kept scope down, yet still sounded fun and connected me to others who participated back in the day. With that personal connection driving me, I pulled up the Sketchbook Jam... but slammed into the wall of creative voice. Pre-pandemic, I had felt a soulless burnout when I tried to churn out solo game ideas after graduating. It matters too much to my sentimental ass to create in a way that's neither impersonal nor arbitrary, else why bother? Thankfully over the years that burnout drove me to clarify my creative tastes. Not just what I can make -- what I can make. The single piece missing was an aesthetic concept to evoke these values.
Thus, I laid my heart bare, in both feeling and experience. Rising to the surface I called out the strongest VR-vibe: deep wistfulness that overcame me struck at the end of Technolust back in my postgrad vocational training years.
--and then this exchange happened. 💡
Like a match to a flame, my imagination 💥 with ideas to turn an unassuming drawing pen into a personal story. Spaces would be dotted with ideas like stars, twirling idly as they waited for players to connect them into constellations. Link enough and your creations would let you into the next room. However, soon you'd start to see the world fade away around you as each successful line now hides more of the room, stars, players, and your constellations from you. Ultimately stranded under the evening twilight but for a single shut door, you could realize your ability to create a star for yourself. (…If I had established it in a reasonable yet subtle way.)
The tone would swing upward, as linking your own ideas reveals the ideas of other players. Bridging the two sets of ideas even reveals your avatars! Audio too, if it were possible to mute that earlier. So the story closes, not with you bringing back the old world, but by building up a new one for yourselves. Effectively lets you loose in an endless "free creating" mode of some kind. ✨
There was just one teeny tiny problem...
Fading Vision
I hated it. -- uh, not the skybox -- sitting in front of the editor surrounding it.
See, I signed up back in spring to leave my creative silo. That worked to weather the pandemic, but in VRC I'd seen people create in a way that others could actually discover what you made. Potentially even right in front of you, the person who made it. Yet... here I was, realizing that to reach that point, it would mean not being in VRChat... but back in this damn birdcage of an editor, losing my nights and weekends. Some of my most high-functioning hours that I could be spending on others who didn't want to bother me -- because I always seemed so busy creating. I wanted to be in VRChat around others and their creativity, not in Unity haunted by my own reflection in the monitor.
-- I'd found my creative voice, just in time to lose my creative purpose. 💀 Since around 2007, "creating-first to connect-second" defined me. It's why I picked game development over a more sane career in coding. There's simply no beating the number of creative trades to both learn from and support in turn. That "nexus" ideology stuck with me for over a decade, becoming the focus of my postgrad training's application. Two years later in mock interviews at the end of that program, I expanded that nexus for VR. Even more creative disciplines collaborate there. Coincidentally, the interviewer put it to me what my "dream VR game to make" would be, then. Unprepared, I suggested the combination of VR with a game I personally loved: LittleBigPlanet. Yeah. Yeah. 💦 My dream game now exists all around my day to day, yet so too does that exact Sketchbook Jam story arc of my familiar walls and ideas vanishing around me.
I managed to ensnare myself in some pretty poetic shit, ha.
But if I'm going to lose that part of my identity -- "creating-first"
-- maybe my wish to pick VRChat before Unity is "connecting-first" instead, as my new world to build up?
Following Values
First I had to accept what this meant for my ties with that creator community. They genuinely anchored my interest in VRChat, as I've experienced some of the coolest creations and people I've ever met through them. Yet their events are popular enough that I already felt like I was "taking a seat away" from others. It's twice as true now--especially if that's someone actually creating worlds! 😓 I do still watch their streams when I can, and I don't think the full-instance situation would deter me had I not bounced off Unity as above...
… It just stings that, in the same moment I've discovered "connecting-first"... that means losing what did link me to so many individuals. I've been burned in the past by thinking a group feels like "my people." But even if my brain knew better than to apply that label here, my heart's fucking soft, man. Some of the people in this community were the first to really show me around VRChat. Experiences that always fuel my care for this platform and this travelogue to this day. Right or wrong tomorrow, it sucks to say goodbye to that today.
To stop burying the lede--might wonder why "ExploreVRChat" is even in the title, right? But it's accurate to how I fell onto their server's doorstep! As luck would have it, an acquaintance from an unrelated Discord sent the invite. I'd just asked for worlds to show friends. 🤯 That whole saga took me from July (first pulling up Sketchbook Jam) to the other end of August trying to cope. As serendipity (anti-serendipity?) would again have it, I'd actually seen ExploreVRChat's booth in June while exploring the VRCon 2021 world...
…but only saw the Twitter. Entirely missed the Discord. Coincidences are crazy sometimes... then it hit me:
If I could no longer personally appreciate creativity by making worlds--
Then the nearest approximation could be appreciation by exploring worlds!
Moreover, even if maybe that logic's a stretch, it can't be denied that exploring is way more accessible. There is no "I don't create anymore, so I probably don't have much place in discussions about improving lighting" to burn me. (Unless I guess you just loathe exploring worlds, but I sure hope I never have that problem. 😂)
So with that conclusion I set up my pings to alert me for ExploreVRChat's next hop happening in a weekish.
-- Just to warn, it gets messier before it gets better. 🔥 Maybe it's just the cost of redefining who you are? 🔍
Chasing After
It's night. My avatar's feet leave the ground as soon as they land, low-gravity leaping between a series of three-story café lookalikes. The coffee bars frame the edges of a boulevard clear to the world's far end, a sleepy road beneath a starry sky... yet it's all pragmatically lit for daytime visibility. So as I sail through the air, I'm left at a loss: why I can't locate the one other person in this instance?
Glimpses of movement could be his dark suit and reddish spiky hair vanishing into a portal. But with no nameplate in sight (and textures so Modernist), it could just be the jitter of inky exteriors and mahogany seating lagging into view. Finding little success, I stop just shy of yeeting myself into the void's kill-plane; I've run out of street. The quick menu validates my fear because it's somehow just me in the instance now. Cool.
But it looks like he's still on blue, and VR raves taught me to be wary of making harsh judgments too fast. So, it's join number 2: warmly welcomed by a blanket of smog, I hear distant footsteps reverberate overhead. Calling up flights of shadowy stairs, I stumble into the topmost rooms to find... no one home. Still too slow. -- and was this normal?
Third time's the charm, I guess. With a last deep breath, I hit that Join button for a final mulligan. Whispers of self-doubt nudge a little more stubbornly than earlier, which I tepidly start to deflect.
"Even if it goes as horribly as possible, I'm sure there are other--"
oh.
Inches from my face, a clump of red spikes point back at me where I spawn, motionlessly AFK. In hindsight, maybe he took the headset off after leaving the last world and hitting Go to enter this one. For me though? My breakneck chase not only slammed into a jumpscare, but has trapped me on a tiny staircase behind him! Clipping past the hair quills, I browse the arcade cabinets, game cartridges, and period comics. Cooling off from how high I'd just jumped, I realize that while I have successfully found the event host... after a good few minutes of idly scanning the small, cozy world, I see that he's going to be off a while. I'd almost think a monkey's paw had more than five fingers at this point. \o/
Sure enough, not long after I hauled myself outta his hair, I see the message that he needs to slide the event to the next day. To be entirely fair, that kind of worked better for my schedule. Just sobered me how spoiled I'd been hanging around communities/clubs with formal event schedules... but I also couldn't get over some of the worlds I'd seen in my silly chase. This little preview-taste of adventure echoed what I loved most not just in that creator community's events, but prior moments of wonder when first... well, exploring VRChat. ✨
Catching Up
Admittedly, that preview didn't exactly ease my anxieties about fitting in either. But even so, I let a wry smile flicker across my face starting the real deal's first world -- none other than yesterday's nerdy basement. 🤪
What can I say other than that I just had such a genuine blast? No qualifiers!
Now, yes -- it did take time to figure out who I could talk to comfortably.
Yes -- I didn't get to meet and talk to every single person there, and,
Yes -- I didn't have the guts to send friend requests to everyone I did.
But--it really made a world of difference to me to experience this worldhop.
To just worry about nothing more than what was in the world itself, pointing out to each other tidbits we'd ferreted out about its interactions, secrets... goofy collision exploits. >.> I think it's a genuinely cool part of social VR that a worldhop can have all these different flavors:
With creators giving feedback: connecting by discussing prefabs, engine limits, network behaviors.
With my home crew: connecting by idle chitchat or personal stories, the map's mostly a backdrop.
With these "explorers:" the map itself instead becomes the star of the show. Compared to the tech knowledge or varying degrees of social skills that expedite connecting in the above two scenarios... if you can simply share and comment on whatever you find in-world, you're now connecting!
-- granted, these are heavily overlapping patterns. They aren't exclusive to any one community. Instead, it has a parallel to that player motivation trifecta of "creators," "sharers," and "explorers" for me! (cf. "Intro" here.)
We tried to sail in boats that did not want to cooperate and we shared some very beer-colored wine, paddling out to the river's edges and groaning at the invisible walls shuttering our efforts to reach a faraway lighthouse. That I started to connect with a name or two in the first major exploration just by collaborating on what we found reveals a powerful icebreaker in "Hey, can you get this to work?" or "whoa, look at this thing!!" Even just handing a bottle to a cat felt like breaking bread in this surreal VR-distinct way. +_+
The smoky room with the inky stairs made its return, as someone swapped into a silly base I'd seen before, but now equipped with a stun gun able to zap others with the same avatar. The world's vibe vs. the lot of us making each other freeze and flop onto the floor for a few seconds before popping upright still cracks me up.
We tried on silly accessories, rode nostalgic rides/tornadoes, got stuck in chairs, hang-glided around VR art, and vibed to visualizers together. We voiced what songs and symbols we recognized or moved us. We covered the eyes of our tazer-friend so they wouldn't get motion sickness! 🤭💕 We lamented the sun setting on so many SDK2 worlds that we'll never be able to see; we died laughing when the event host changed avatars to start fishing us out of a lake. I may have also accidentally led some of the group into a hidden portal... what I get for using the still-behind-beta Portal Prompt to try peeking past the portal. >_>" Could've sworn I heard the host's laughter as I was shouting "oh God no wait actually don't follow me unless you have--oh no." 😂
Some of that breakneck speed from the prior Friday chase clicked for me, too. -- With no tours by the map creator or feedback to give them and thousands more places to survey, the second it seemed we scoped a world dry we'd roll right on. My other communities I felt usually hung around for 10-15 minutes even in smaller worlds... EVRC it was more like "any area or thing anyone feels like we didn't check? If not, onward!"
I share all this to first acknowledge anyone can experience a lot of these things with the groups I've been in. However, I also say all this because, around this particular Explore-centric group, I felt like most of the 10-ish who came to this event really had this... I don't know, "curiosity" may be the right word? That I absolutely adored. And hell, I could mostly be projecting. 🙃 But regardless, there was a particular world we went to at the end that I probably would not think of so much, had I not gone there at this time with this server group:
-- it sincerely shocked me with a very particular, deeply moving emotion. Caked in deja vu, it was exactly that enamoring awe I experienced in that first meetup I ever had. The kindly veteran player-creators who decided to informally invite some faceless newcomers--that happened to include me. It's not just the map being great, which it REALLY was. It's an emotion born of feeling connected to the people you're creating the experience with as much as it is the thing you're experiencing together. Ultimately just the kind of good times that take root, finding a genuine home in my heart (and notes like this website's) forever. It's why I keep traveling... but maybe it's also what "creating-through-connecting" instead of "creating-to-connect" looks like.
Continuing On
Now it's been over a month since that Twitter picture. Let's go over the open questions to see how that has all turned out in practice, shall we?
Has it been enough, going from that creator Discord group to this ExploreVRChat one?
I think I'm growing to appreciate new groups don't always "replace" old ones. That former group felt like an MMO raid organizer: the goal was everyone primarily swarming on worlds together. Whereas EVRC's server primarily provides resources for individuals. So it's more of a guild in the classic sense: drop in, get intel, pick destinations, roll out! Admittedly then I feel it's probably easiest for me if I pursue connecting-over-creating with the Ancients instead, while letting EVRC cover my need to discover new things. Which leads to the next question:
Will I not just continue to grow desensitized and familiar, drifting from communities?
What about my first VRChat world?
Am I actually satisfied with these definitely-not-quarter-life-crisis-y developments?
Special thanks to Rickity and all the people I've interacted with at EVRC, to Joker for linking me their server, and to Faxmashine for showing me around VRChat and the Community Meetup. Best of luck, friends. ♡
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