We met in virtual reality (opens in new tab), HBO’s documentary filmed entirely in VRChat, struggles to capture reality outside of itself. VRChat has been ahead of its time since 2014: it’s the non-business metaverse for catgirls and memes. It’s a first-person online game where you can do just about anything you would in real life, as long as the developer and animator community can make it. You must have seen clips of it with everything from VTubers (opens in new tab)Sonic characters (opens in new tab)and anime protagonists (opens in new tab).
It naturally attracts a lot of people who for some reason are not comfortable in the real world. VRChat is a space where gender, sexuality, and especially bodies, are really fluid, and as a result, it’s incredibly queer. It’s not Facebook’s vision of VR, or the way people make games (opens in new tab) it said in May, the “sexless, Zuckerbergian, brand-friendly presentation” of Meta’s multibillion-dollar metaverse. It is a place where people can discover their identities, meet others or closely imitate large retail chains (opens in new tab) and role-play as the cashiers.
To its credit, We Met can communicate the charming absurdity of VRChat in Virtual Reality over a runtime of one hour and 33 minutes. But heartfelt, documentary footage of anime characters and furries shaking their seats isn’t the whole story. Director Joe Hunting locks the virtual camera on a handful of people who spend most of their lives in the online game and see it as a necessity after Covid locks them inside.
Hunting follows a woman who teaches ASL to deaf and hard-of-hearing players every day of the week in a replica classroom, two couples thousands of miles apart in the real world, and several others who put a part of themselves into play. We Met in Virtual Reality is a useful representation of the types of relationships and activities found in VRChat, but the insistence on pointing the mic only at the most committed players narrows and, frankly, dates the point it tries to to make.
As People Make Games made clear in the much shorter documentary on VRChat, the game is messy and the players are streaked. At worst, VRChat is an isolated space where racism goes unpunished and underage players are a few clicks away from pornography and abuse. In this way, VRChat is like the early internet, before Google and Twitter and Facebook and the control methods – good and bad – that platform owners have put on how you interact with others online. An almost entirely positive view of VRChat is to misunderstand what is really going on in the largely unmoderated world and what it looks like to those out there.
We Met In Virtual Reality, with its lingering claims of the freedom of virtual reality, doesn’t give itself the tools to tackle a game that is technically free to play by anyone, but is most effective under an expensive VR headset. (opens in new tab)defines the type of people who have access to interact with it regularly in the ways the movie is most interested in. Last week, VRChat players pushed back against (opens in new tab) the addition of Easy Anti-Cheat, a technology that breaks accessibility mods that people use to add things like subtitles. We Met in Virtual Reality never questions its subject matter what a future looks like for a social platform that could succumb to the pressure of cleaning itself up with decisions that could prevent it from being a place for everyone.
As a series of stories about people, We Met works in Virtual Reality. It finds surprisingly beautiful pictures of the often flat, nervous look of the game world and never makes the people look respectful. But those stories have occurred throughout the history of online gaming, in more rudimentary spaces. When the World’s Biggest Companies Spend Billions (opens in new tab) of dollars on their own version of VRChat, it’s clear that most people have passed the need to see how online relationships aren’t some weird, rare thing that deserves a 90-minute inspection. Now what’s important is to show how platforms where players have more autonomy, like VRChat, can adapt as the vision of Meta and others for the metaverse leach the most hopeful parts of its creativity for profit.
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