Tag: VRChat

HBO Max Documentary Review: We Met in Virtual Reality

This evening, I finally had an opportunity to watch Joe Hunting’s full-length documentary, We Met in Virtual Reality, which I first wrote about last year. This is my review of that documentary.

Here’s an overview of Joe’s film, taken from his IndieGogo page:

We Met in Virtual Reality is an enchanting portrait of social Virtual Reality (VR) app VRChat, composed of intimate and hilarious moments inside global VR communities. The film presents an emotive impression on this new virtual landscape through a poetic collage of stories, exploring how VR is affecting the way we socialise, work, love and express ourselves; told authentically by the users of VRChat through a warm heartfelt lens. 

The overall narrative is made up of three distinct protagonists each presenting unique stories of discovering a romantic relationship through VRChat, and using VR to cope with poor mental health. These core narratives flow between each other in a linear fashion through Winter 2020 to Summer 2021, delivering a compelling journey amidst the more observational moments in other VR communities.

Filmed entirely inside VRChat using cinematic virtual cameras during the COVID lockdown crisis, this film captures a precious time in an underground cultural movement that will soon shape the world we live in; additionally highlighting contemporary subjects such as of coping with poor mental health, modern forms of sign language, non-binary gender expression and finding love beyond physical interaction. Everyone appearing in the film will be addressed by their virtual usernames without any real life imagery, immersing audiences into a new cinematic documentary experience.

This documentary has three main storylines: the American Sign Language (ASL) teachers teachers Jenny0629 and Ray_is_Deaf, who work at Helping Hands; one couple, DustBunny and Toaster; and a second couple, IsYourBoi and DragonHeart. Both couples first met each other within VRChat. In addition, there are many cameos of a number of other characters, who candidly discuss various aspects of being an avatar on a social VR platform.

Among the worlds explored are a dinosaur theme park, a camel ride through the desert, an improv comedy stage show, a New Year’s Eve countdown celebration, and the Zodiac Club, an exotic dance club. Many of the avatars shown have eye, finger and even full-body tracking, which gives the viewer a really good idea of what you can accomplish in VR (for example, shooting a game of pool, or taking part in a belly-dancing lesson!). This film will be a real eye-opener to the metaverse neophyte who might have thought that being in virtual reality meant that you would be limited to only moving your head and your hands!

There are moments of glorious hijinks in this documentary, as well as some sombre discussions of mental health issues. Joe does a masterful job of editing, moving smoothly from one story to another, and he wisely gives the people he profiles the time and space required for them to tell their stories, each in their own fashion. It’s been a joy to see Joe Hunting burnish his skills as a documentary filmmaker over time!

The decision was made to film the entire documentary in VRChat, so there is no jarring back-and-forth between the virtual world and the real. In fact, one of the underlying messages of We Met in Virtual Reality is that the virtual can, in fact, become the real. The communities and relationships Joe documents are just as authentic as any in the real world! (While this will not come as a surprise to any of my blog readers, many of whom already have experience in countless virtual worlds, it might come as a shock to those who have not yet set foot in the metaverse.)

In fact, the outreach potential of having Joe’s documentary available on a major TV/movie streaming service such as HBO Max means that a lot more people will learn about social VR and the metaverse in general, and VRChat in particular!

I do find it ironic that this documentary—which focuses so wonderfully on the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community of Helping Hands—has been released on HBO Max at the very moment when the VRChat community is in an uproar over an update which has disabled many popular mods intended to serve the Deaf and hard-of-hearing, providing core functionality which the official VRChat client still lacks.

The documentary is available in both closed-caption and described-video versions, and you can watch it on HBO Max in the United States, and through Crave TV in Canada (which carries HBO content). Here’s a list of the other countries where HBO Max is available.

Joe Hunting has crafted a love letter to VRChat, and if you watch only one film about the metaverse this year, We Met in Virtual Reality is that film. Highly recommended, particularly if you are brand new to social VR and VRChat. I give it five stars out of five! ★★★★★

VRChat’s Latest Security Update, Incorporating Easy Anti Cheat, Is Causing Controversy Among Users

Yesterday, VRChat posted the following blogpost to their official blog, titled The VRChat Security Update:

“Modified clients” are a large problem for VRChat in a variety of ways. Malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues. Even seemingly non-malicious modifications complicate the support and development of VRChat, and make it impossible for VRChat creators to work within the expected, documented bounds of VRChat.

In order to prevent that, we’ve implemented Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) into VRChat.

If you’ve played Apex Legends, Fortnite, Gears of War, Elden Ring, or many more, you’ve seen Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC).

EAC is the industry-leading anti-cheat service. It’s lightweight, effective, and privacy-focused. In short, for any game or platform looking to prevent malicious users from breaking the rules, it’s a powerful solution.

The integration of EAC means that all modified clients are blocked. The problems mentioned above will be minimized if not outright eliminated, improving the VRChat experience for users and creators.

Malicious client modifications are responsible for a massive amount of issues for both our team and our users. We’ve been listening to you cry out for a solution to being harassed, griefed, and constantly crashed, so we’re taking further steps to address one of the roots of the problem.

Our Trust & Safety and User Support teams witness first hand how much damage modified clients do to the platform. 

Every month, thousands of users have their accounts stolen, often due to running a modified client that is silently logging their keystrokes as well as other information. These users – often without even realizing it! – run the risk of losing their account, or having their computers become part of a larger botnet. 

These networks of modified clients perform malicious actions without informing users – such as reporting back user locations to harassers or stalkers, ripping and archiving avatars, allowing mass harassment of users via automated actions, and even acting as nodes for distributed “zombie” botnets. We’ve directly observed this happening innumerable times, and it alarms us!

Additionally, all modified clients – even ones that aren’t malicious – are a burden for creators. We regularly speak to many that have spent hours (or days) debugging user issues, only to realize that the culprit is a modified client. This frustration ultimately has a chilling effect on VRChat creators, hurting their enthusiasm and preventing them from building awesome things. 

This pain extends to VRChat support too – any time we update, we get a massive amount of bug reports that end up just being broken modifications. In addition to burning developer time, this support burden also frustrates less technically-inclined users who didn’t know what they were getting into by installing these modifications.

Now, keep in mind that it has always been against the VRChat Terms of Service to make modifications to the official VRChat client. Those who break the ToS risk being banned from the platform, but (much like earlier flatscreen virtual worlds, e.g. Second Life), there’s really very little stopping an infringer from creating a brand new account to get around the ban.

However, it appears that many users are unhappy with this latest move by the company, which will impact useful mods as well. Among the ways users are voicing their displeasure is by review-bombing VRChat on Steam:

However, this has not gone down well with the game’s community. Modding was a large part of the VRChat experience despite it being technically disallowed. Mods are currently used to address the game’s poor performance as well as to add missing accessibility features such as speech-to-text (via PCGamer).

Recent Steam reviews for VRChat are currently sitting at “mostly negative” as thousands of negative reviews are flooding in from displeased community members.

One such negative review lists the negative outcomes bringing EAC will cause for VRChat. “What EAC will do for VRChat: Lower framerates, increase instability, stop script kiddies, stop “wholesome” mods, accessibility mods, and quality of life mods, Stop [GPU software] from improving your framerate…”

One user with almost 9,000 hours left a sarcastic positive review, stating that the uninstall button works great on the game. Another simply stated, “horrible devs, entirely disconnected from the community and what they want.”

The VRChat development team has yet to address the ongoing community backlash to their decision.

A reportor from TheGamer website writes:

As highlighted by a ResetEra thread, there have been over 5,000 negative reviews filed since July 1. This has brought the recent reviews score down to Mostly Negative despite the game’s Very Positive overall rating. Mods are against VRChat’s terms of service but the community use a slew of client-side addons to fix a lot of the bugs while also adding key quality of life features. But these mods do a lot more than that, making the game safer, and they’re set to break with the anti-cheat update.

Mods such as AdvancedSafety, LagFreeScreenshots, JoinNotifier, UIExpansionKit, and CameraMinus will all be flagged by the anti-cheat, resulting in a ban for users. The community has voiced concern over this with the Discord racking up complaints and backlash as a feedback post on the official website accumulates over 18,600 upvotes.

An anonymous source has shared with me the following message which is circulating among the VRChat hacker/mod community:

As some of you may have noticed, VRChat’s next big update is regarding their new EAC (Easy Anti Cheat).

This means that any mods you may have been using, VRChat is requiring you to get rid of them on this next update. You won’t be able to launch the game until done so.

>>I WOULD REFRAIN FROM LOGGING ONTO VRCHAT AT THIS MOMENT<<

Still waiting on more information from VRChat regarding this entire situation. I will be keeping an eye out and will update here as well.

As you may have noticed, VRChat has released an open beta that includes Easy Anti-Cheat, which prevents use of mods.

Playing cat-and-mouse game with anti-cheat developers is not something that could be won by a modding community as big and open as ours, so if this open beta makes it to release as-is, this would mean the end of wholesome modding.

Now is your chance to tell VRChat that this is a dumb change. It does not solve ripping or crasher avatars. It probably won’t stop malicious mods, as they’re way smaller and can evade anti-cheat easier. Nor do they open source their code, meaning you never really know what you are running, and risk getting your account stolen, or worse.

However, it prevents you from having unlimited avatar favourites. It prevents you from using anti-crash mods. It prevents you from using all other mod features you’ve come to enjoy. It prevents you from using safe, open-source mods that never made anyone’s experience worse.

So, we recommend that you cancel your VRC+ if you have it, and do not launch VRChat for at least a week to produce a visible player count drop. Encourage your friends to do the same, even if they don’t use mods themselves. Anti-community measures like these from a greedy corporation should be protested as loudly as possible. You can take the time off VRChat to explore alternative platforms – Neos provides a different experience, and ChilloutVR aims to be similar to what you know (you can even auto-convert some of your avatars!). Or you can choose to experience other VR and flatscreen games together with friends you’ve made in VRChat.

This is not really a “security update”. It much more of a “we’re too afraid of people doing our job better than us” update.

You can upvote a Canny post here.

Stay tuned—it looks like things are going to get interesting! 😉

UPDATE 9:39 p.m.: ThrillSeeker spends the first ten minutes of his 15-minute weekly VR news update discussing this story, making an excellent case that VRChat should have implemented the accessibility features provided by some mods before implementing EAC and cutting off thousands of users who relied on things such as speech-to-text:

He makes some excellent points, and ones that VRChat should listen to.

UPDATE July 28th, 2022: Tech website Kotaku has published an update to the situation, titled The World’s Most Popular Social VR Game Is In Turmoil:

Whether this week’s Security Update will go down as a decisive turning point in the history of the VRChat community or just a larger-than-usual blip remains to be seen. But two things are certain: A lot of players are angry, and the Security Update is here to stay.

A New Feature-Length Investigative Documentary by BrandonFM Looks at a Very Dark and Disturbing Side of VRChat

Every so often, something hits you like a sucker punch to the gut. This is one of those times.

Somebody alerted me to this brand new, investigative-documentary-style video on YouTube, and I started watching it this evening. Even before I had reached the halfway point of the video, I knew I had to stop watching it, and write this blogpost.

While it is titled The Dark Side of Virtual Reality, this one-hour-48-minute video is entirely about a single popular social VR platform, VRChat. The creator is a man by the name of BrandonFM (his channel only has 3 videos so far; after I finish watching this, I will certainly be watching his two earlier videos, which appear to be on similar topics to this new one).

WARNING: This YouTube video covers some very disturbing topics! Consider yourself forewarned!

TRIGGER WARNING: This video discusses sexual content involving minors, and will likely be upsetting to some viewers.

Brandon’s video talks about the hidden adult content in VRChat, which I have written about before here (ironically, this safe-for-work post by far the most popular blogpost on the RyanSchultz.com blog). And I’ve even written fairly recently about the Nevermet app, which is briefly mentioned in this video.*

This is a not-safe-for-work side of VRChat which I had suspected to exist, based on that previous blogpost I wrote about adult content in VRChat, but I had never actually set (virtual) foot in. But I never knew about some of the darkest depths uncovered here by Brandon—particularly where it involves minors. (He uses the word “degenerate” a lot in this video, and frankly, it’s the appropriate word.)

In 2007, Linden Lab (the makers of Second Life) underwent a public relations disaster when this sort of behaviour was discovered happening on its platform (item #4 on my list of scandals and controversies in SL):

The virtual pedophilia uncovered by two different news reporters in Second Life was a public relations disaster of the highest order for Linden Lab…Linden Lab responded to the crisis by creating an official Ageplay Policy, where people involved in ageplay and virtual pedophilia activities were banned from the platform.

Well, it would appear that a similar scandal may soon befall VRChat, once the major news media latch onto this story (and believe me, they will!). And, once again, a metaverse platform is going to be in the white-hot glare of the media spotlight, and have to scramble to address a public relations disaster. It’s happened before, and it will happen again.

So, I’m just going to post this, then finish watching this video, then I will add some more of my thoughts (I’m sure I will have some!).

UPDATE 9:06 p.m.: O.K., I have not yet finished watching the entire video, but holy shit. I’m really impressed with the work that BrandonFM and his team did in researching and reporting on these stories, as well as the overall editing of the documentary.

What I now want to know is: What has VRChat done in response to this video? Do they even know about it? Brandon posted it on May 6th, 2022, but it only has a relatively paltry 88,500 views so far (possibly because it does not have “VRChat” in the title?).

Also, this video talks about things such as slave auctions, something which (unfortunately) still can be found among the adult (18+) community in Second Life, despite calls from some people to forbid any slavery completely on the platform (pertinent thread from the SL Community Forums). In fact, there are numerous SL sims devoted to Gorean roleplay (based on the “of Gor” series of science fiction novels written by philosophy professor John Lange, writing as John Norman), in which slavery is commonplace.

What really struck me, in fact, is that VRChat is struggling with many of the same sorts of problems that Second Life has been struggling with throughout its own 18-year history.

O.K., back to the video…

UPDATE 9:48 p.m.: I finally finished the video, and I immediately became one of BrandonFM’s patrons on Patreon (here’s his Patreon page if you are similarly inclined). Seriously, this documentary was a trip, and this 58-year-old blogger learned a lot of things about VRChat that I did not know before (like the gangs of crashers, and the zoophiliac “hypnotherapist”, and the drug dealing, and the doxxing). The documentary is like a fever dream. My head is kind of spinning with it all.

Brandon did a masterful job of video editing (although the voice distortion used for some avatars interviewed made it a bit difficult to understand what they were saying).

My initial response after watching Brandon’s video is that, once this information becomes more widely known, VRChat is going to receive some serious pushback from parents and officials for its current Teen (age 13+) rating. It’s going to be interesting to see how much traction Brandon’s documentary will achieve, and what kind of impact it will have on the platform overall (hopefully, positive).

I also need to let everything percolate for a little while, so I am not going to delete any blogposts I have written in the past about adult content in VRChat, or Nevermet. I need to think things through, and not act simply as a knee-jerk reaction, despite how appalled I am at some of things that Brandon has uncovered. And I definitely need to watch his earlier videos!

* I did explicitly warn the people behind the Nevermet app that they needed to pay attention to the serious problem of potentially underage users setting up profiles. Now that I am watching Brandon’s documentary, which mentions Nevermet in passing, I have a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’m going to finish watching this video, then I might have to make some decisions about what to do about my review of Nevermet, in light of the information Brandon has reported.

I Was Interviewed by a Business Reporter for The Globe and Mail for an Article About the Metaverse

On March 10th, 2022, I was contacted by Joe Castaldo, a business reporter for The Globe and Mail (which bills itself as “Canada’s National Newspaper”). He was writing up a story about businesses entering the metaverse, and the current metaverse hype cycle, and he asked me if I would be willing to be interviewed.

After checking in with my union representatives at the university, who gave me the all-clear to go ahead, I was interviewed for an hour via telephone. The Globe and Mail had given Joe a Meta Quest 2 wireless VR headset, so a couple of weeks later, I gave him a guided tour of two popular social VR platforms, VRChat and AltspaceVR.

Well, Joe’s article was published in The Globe and Mail today, titled Is the metaverse the future of the internet? A Globe journalist steps inside to find out (if you should hit a paywall, here is an archived version).

I’m not going to reproduce the entire newspaper article here; I was mentioned in the final few paragraphs:

For Ryan Schultz, the widespread interest in the metaverse is a little weird. “My obscure, niche hobby has suddenly gone mainstream,” he told me. A reference librarian with the University of Manitoba, he spends a few hours every week strapped into a headset or exploring desktop-based worlds, and has been blogging about it for years.

Mr. Schultz finds the speculative nature of the digital land rush in some worlds off-putting. “People are investing in this basically as a flex and as a boast to their friends that they can afford these artificially limited items,” he said. Businesses with virtual office space, meanwhile, are likely spending money on a “really fancy three-dimensional brochure.”

He’s seen much of it before. Corporations flocked to Second Life when it took off in the 2000s. Coca-Cola installed soft drink machines, Toyota set up a car dealership, American Apparel built a clothing store, and IBM established an island for employee recruitment and training.

It wasn’t long before the corporate enthusiasm died. “Nobody came to visit these locations, because the people who were already in Second Life didn’t care,” Mr. Schultz said.

He understands the appeal of virtual worlds, though. When he first discovered Second Life, he spent hours there each day. Away from the computer, he has jokingly called himself an “overweight, divorced, gay librarian with diabetes.” At 58, he feels his body growing older, and he’s struggled with depression so bad he’s taken leaves from work. “I kinda suck at this whole reality business,” he wrote on his blog.

In Second Life, Mr. Schultz loved building avatars – angels, supermodels and a Na’vi from, well, Avatar. There was solace in becoming someone else. During the pandemic, he’s met his social needs through virtual reality, and a mental-health app became a lifeline. “I can put on my headset, join a group, and use cognitive behavioural therapy techniques to work through issues and problems, and it’s extremely powerful,” he said. “You feel like you’re really present.”

For those of us who are not already immersed, such moments are likely a long way off. I searched high and low for meaning and connection in the metaverse, but mostly found empty branding experiences, a speculative frenzy around digital assets, and people who were just as curious as I was to find out what this was all about, and were still searching for answers.

But given the relentless enthusiasm of those trying to turn the metaverse into some kind of reality, there will be plenty of chances to try again, for better or worse.

I think that Joe did a good job of describing the metaverse in a way that newspaper readers could easily understand, and there are a couple of videos included in the digital version of the article which made me laugh at certain points, as Joe and his producer Patrick Dell navigated Decentraland and Horizon Worlds!

I also appreciated that the online article linked out to my ever-popular list of social VR platforms and virtual worlds. I’m not really expecting a spike in traffic to my blog (I didn’t get one when I was interviewed by a writer for New Yorker magazine in 2019), but it was an interesting experience, nonetheless.

(By the way, I do receive more and more requests to be interviewed lately, because of my blog. I turn most of them down, but I said yes to this one, because The Globe and Mail is a major Canadian newspaper, and one which I read often.)

The Globe and Mail newspaper interviewed me for an article on the metaverse

P.S. The mental health app mentioned in the quote above is called Help Club; here’s the blogpost which I wrote about this self-help social VR app for mental health.