Around the Metaverse – What Sansar Can Learn from VRChat

I will start off by reminding you again that everything I say is my opinion only and may not represent the beliefs of the myMusicOasis gang. 

Recently, a long-time acquaintance from back in the HighFidelityVR days(Philip Rosedale’s early VR Venture that closed after four years) told me he had gotten a job with VRChat. I shrieked in response and asked him how he could work at that den of iniquity. My response was based on hearsay, and ignorance.  

The 19^th century British philosopher, Herbert Spencer is responsible for my favorite quote. He said: “Contempt, prior to investigation, is folly.” Yet here I was committing folly, by assuming I knew what VRChat was about, although I had spent scant time there. 

I saw a long video posted on some Discord channels that purported to be about the “dark side” of VRChat. I watched, horrified, as pedophiles and predators worked their ways in the most populated virtual world. I did recall that all this depravity had occurred in Second Life in the past, and probably continues to this day. Still I was shocked by what I had seen. 

A friend of mine took me on a PG tour of VRChat. I was able to play a rock-climbing game, drive cars that really allowed one to use a clutch and shift and visited worlds of such beauty that I was disabused of the notion that VRChat is primitive and ugly. I used Sansar as a measuring stick to believe that VRChat was ugly. That was the first hint I got that I was wrong. 

Following that, another video about VRChat landed in my Discord servers, and I was told it was a more reasoned view of the platform. This turned out to be true. I recommend you watch both videos and draw your own conclusions. The first one is quite hard to take, so I advise caution. 

WHAT I LEARNED 

I both love and hate being wrong. When I am wrong it stings a bit. However, being wrong affords one the opportunity to have a change of perspective. The second VRChat video, by a group called People Make Games makes that exact point. Without any judgment or slant, the reporters speak with several VRChat residents, showing the Wild West aspects of VRChat in a way that reveals something very significant to me. 

Without the constraint of “We gotta make money!!!,” VRChat has evolved into the world that its users want. What do they want: 

• The freedom to create whatever they want. 

• The freedom to be whomever they want to be – the majority of VRChat users are anime girls, while the demographic skews largely to males) 
• The freedom to have private worlds where they can express their emotions freely – public spaces can be filled with screaming children and trolls (thanks to the Quest2 easy access), but private spaces are often serene and often sexy. 
• The lack of emphasis on monetization. 

The list could be a lot longer, but it contains the word freedom quite often. What people, mostly young people, want is to be able to do what they want. It’s crazy to argue with what exists. It would be like saying: Why are there elephants? Elephants make no sense. 

So, what I learned is that VRChat is whatever you want it to be. I would not create a sex dungeon, because it’s not what I want, but if you want to you can. Sansar might want to think about what is allowed in Sansar. An avatar with missing private parts is OK, if that’s what you want.  

MONETIZATION 

I will go there. Sansar gave away the store by allowing users so many free worlds. However, in VRChat you don’t have to pay for worlds, and they host them as they do in Sansar. Sansar makes its money from Market transactions and fees, and in so doing lost a lot of creators, because the tariff was just too high. In VRChat the market exists external to the platform, and this has been a problem for VRChat. The most popular social VR world is floundering financially in comparison to its user base. True, they offer a premium membership, but that does not make enough money for them. Yet, as the most popular world, they receive a lot of funding from investors. 

I don’t care what Sansar does to make money. I think it’s more important that they open to more freedoms for the users. This seems to be what people want. If you get more people, somehow more money will follow.  

The VRChat experiment has created an absorbing, wild, untamed wilderness that can be fun or horrifying to explore. It’s what people want. Can Sansar go there? 

LINKS TO VIDEOS: 

The Dark Side of Virtual Reality (WARNING: This video can be disturbing) 

The Dark Side of Virtual Reality 

Making Sense of VRChat: 

Making Sense of VRChat, the “Metaverse” People Actually Like