vr chat journals

    My house has not seen a trick or treater in 5 years. Something I don't particularly miss, but none the less does direct how I spend my Halloween nights. This year (2024) I spent Halloween night in VR Chat. Mostly hanging around in "Trash Compactor" worlds; a game world that consists of a player shooting physics objects to knock the other players off junk into a big hole. That night was effectively by myself, I did not say a single word across my 4 hour play session.

    Every night following I would play VR Chat before bed, without any of my friends. Mostly spent silent, but not exclusively. Each night spent would be capped with a "vr chat journal" that I would spend no more than 30 minutes on.

     My Halloween night of journal depicts my avatar getting turned into a blood of mist by an antagonizing "Trash Compactor" world. My strategy in playing this game is simply to sit on top of the roof of the center most trailer. This specific moment I knew my fate was set, so I decided to face it head on. My character approximately performed this animation as I moved between the laying down state to the crouched state and to the upright state. When I perform these transitions well enough I like to imagine that I am actually performing this with body tracking.

    Day 2 depicts also a "Trash Compactor" world, where a player wearing a Peridot from Steven Universe avatar wouldn't stop staring at me. I was perturbed. But I can't in good faith blame it solely on the Peridot as I was listening to Kid A on repeat which was making geek out on the vibes. This journal was actually scribbled in progressively through my night in contrast to the rest being drawn at the tail end of my play session. The digital numbers are my remberings of the timer that would end each game session. I had grown quite resentful of that timer.

    This one is me fully embracing my stalker persona. I spent the bulk of my night in a populated cabin world. I enjoyed it. It was littered with graffiti which I documented and I will review in a later blog post about my feelings about VR Chat in general. I integrated the graffiti into the journal itself, which I kind of postured as the similarly silent and stalking creatures of Yume Nikki.

    This brief 3 panel comic is a pretty self explanatory experiance. What's left to the imagination is just conditions of the exchange. It was a Trash Compactor instance, that was about to close as the host was going to bed. Before they left, they wanted to play without randoms. Upon this being conveyed I performed the "GMod Dance" included in my avatar's expressions. I wasn't initially trying to convince the owner, I just wanted to not be uncomfortable as they were soon to kick me.

    I enjoyed those 2 last games, I felt welcomed for the first time.

    This last journal was made the same night of the previous; a double feature. Trash Compactor is where I have spent the most time so far in VR Chat. I've found some comfort existing a space where there distractions from literally being social. 

    This night specifically I spawned into a still world; the view port of the game showed a still counter and no players in the play space. But curiously no one in the waiting room despite the player count being 8. I saw in the distance a PNG of a drone flying towards me clipping through the geometry of the world. When the drone penetrated the view port, a young voice asked me "Wanna ride?" which I offered my first and only spoken word of the night "Sure.".

    He then spun in 180° revealing a highlighted box which VR Chat prompted me to "sit". After mounting the beast, he flew me across the distance of the play space into the turret chamber where I saw the previously missing players. After I dismounted, the drone PNG as if he was literally automated made his way slowly across back towards the spawn area. I sat and listened to the mixxed age crowd observing the space of the turret room which isn't usually so free to observation. Like the breadth of my time playing VR Chat, I spent it silent.

    Like many well written we finish where we started; the arena of "Trash Compactor". This time having conquered my shadow: playing the damn game. I think my main reflection is that I enjoy viewing these often commodified and quickly thrown away digital environments. But my will to experience these worlds as though they are digital parks is nothing more than a distraction from actually indulging people in conversation.

    I haven't spent much time in VR Chat since this last journal. I feel that it represents a monkey's paw for my life. I constantly am seeking escapism, not from pain necessarily but from having to address my situation. I think a lot of the people I have happened across in VR Chat are in a very similar camp.

    I think the users of VR Chat have unfairly and very broadly been painted with a color of paint of this escapism. But I would like to retort that a lot of these people just are decompressing. Much in the same fashion someone would after a long day retire to a couch and watch seinfeld, these players retreat to VR. 

I may be stupid

    And my brain is addled with youtube CRAP

But I do know my computer rocks

These worlds make us happy

AND I LOVE YOU

- bb

being one text box away from pretty much perfect.

 

    I first played Link's Awakening when I was 4. I got my copy from Phat Boy's Video Games which in 2009 went out of business and was turned into a Game Stop. On my way home from Phat Boy's Video Games in the back of my mom's Geo Prism, I played Link's Awakening DX in the ugly stretched out mode on my Game Boy Advance SP achieved by pressing the shoulder buttons. I played no more than getting to the forest on that car trip home.

     I never finished Link's Awakening until this year, and before this I did not make it farther than the second dungeon. But with just that narrow slice I knew that it was then my 2nd favorite top-down Zelda game.

    I came back to Link's Awakening this year. This time I came at the game with a more scholarly disposition. I framed it to myself as research for the game I have been writing in C; that aspires to be nothing more than a clone of Link's Awakening but with rogue-like elements inserted in with all the tactfulness of a new Pokemon generations' gimmick.

    In Link's Awakening there a many objects that occupy the width of a tile: pots, rocks, and different kinds of rocks. At the start of the game, you can push only a certain kind of rock. But EVERY SINGLE TIME you press against a big rock or a pot your game freezes as you have to navigate a slow rolling THREE dialogue box-spanning finger-waggle session hinting that you need the power bracelet that can be acquired in the second dungeon.

    This kind of mechanical exposition is the laziest kind you can cram into a game. Its' presence being anchored behind the crawling text roll and three presses of the A button makes it all the more tedious. On this surface, this complaint is on the level of internet game knit-picking to make an earnest man cry. But this petty strife just could not escape my mind as I made my way through the first hours of this game. It was so striking to me that I felt to write this post exclusively about it. 

    What makes it stand out so is just that the rest of the game is so masterfully crafted. Seriously, this game does kicks the cock off of Ocarina of Time and Super Metroid, combined (Doom's shotgun noise). Also its' combat is better than Skyrim  something the 3D Zeldas sincerely cannot claim. So much so that I would rather kill myself than not make a clone that preserves all of the finely tuned UI and Game-loop elements.

    In spite of my exquisite taste in games as a 5 year old, I was wrong to assume that the original Legend of Zelda was better than Link's Awakening. Link's Awakening is the synthesis of all the lessons learned by games made up to that point in time. 

    Also frankly if you feel a lick of sympathy (or equally an ounce of pity) for my 5 year old self's love for the original Zelda's clockwork; the good parts of Skyrim exploration, before I had even heard of chess, you should check your phone in front of a moving bus. (Doom's shotgun noise)

    Link's Awakening released in 1993, 8 years before I was born was basically the best game that had been released up to that point. Its' legacy rightfully earned among those who listen. But to be so close to perfection but to come just short because of a text crawling I find to be the most tragic form of irony. A machine with gears so narrowly calibrated that John Carmack still rolls around and pisses in bed thinking about it, is just so upsettingly tragic.

    I eagerly wait for the night that a steam page is spawned, containing a game remotely as solid in shape and form as Link's Awakening. A game doesn't hold itself down with the burden of the past and doesn't focus on something as mind-numbing as kiting enemies that chase you and with puzzles as primitive as Atari's adventure.

 

I am waiting for the night.