The Realistic Absurdity Of Virtual Reality Raves
Preface: this article was written in real-time and is thus written with somewhat nonsensical structure, with my immediate thoughts and observations just plastered in wherever they happened as I was typing. Is this innovative writing? Probably not. Is it necessary? Probably not? Do I give a shit? Probably not. Is it gonna be harder to read because of it? Probably. Anyways.
At this very moment as I begin to write this article, I’m currently standing in a tiny basement club called SHELTER where NOIRE is playing a hardwave remix of Utada Hikaru’s “Sanctuary” (that I absolutely need a track ID on). “Dude, this song is so nostalgic” says a voice that sounds the way the 😩 emoji looks like it’s vocalizing. Another voice echoes a similar sentiment and more and more join in. I’m currently standing by the speaker in the front corner of the venue dressed as Usada Pekora. To my right is Fennec Fox from the legendary cult classic 2017 3D anime Kemono Friends, hanging out with Kermit The Frog. I’m clearly not at a real life club, but the ridiculousness of the situation feels like it. I’m actually playing the free 2017 PC game, VRChat, and I’m standing in a lovingly crafted club called SHELTER after a buddy tipped me off to an event tonight featuring music by 2ToneDisco, onumi, Clyde Machine, and NOIRE.
I first heard about VRChat back when it came out in 2017 and even added it to my Steam library but never bothered installing or playing it. I decided to just give it a shot last weekend to find some kind of respite from the loneliness that the past year has left on me and inevitably everyone else on earth. I hear the intro melody from Teriyaki Boyz’ “Tokyo Drift” starting. I took a moment to alt-tab back into the club and take in the vibes. It just transitioned into a future bass remix of Renai Circulation. Is it really an anime rave if you don’t hear that “seeeeee no” rap verse by Kana Hanazawa at least once? That’s like the quintessential anime song of that era.
Anyways, there’s something about the absurdity of this situation I’m in that feels almost as realistic as a real anime club night. It feels absurdly claustrophobic, you have to get close to someone just to hear them. There are people you don’t know with big fox tails hanging off their backsides everywhere in sight. The DJ just played that “turn it up!” sample from Kanye West’s “Waves” before transitioning into a song I don’t recognize but would be surprised if it wasn’t a by a member of Wavemob. Even if it wasn’t an intentional musical pun, the cleverness of that sample drop is not lost on me.
This time as I alt-tab back into the game, Fennec Fox has turned their avatar into an adorable tiny version of Serval Cat, also from Kemono Friends and Kermit turned into a cat standing on its hindlegs. To get a better picture, I change to a shorter avatar myself, this time a female Pichu from Pokemon. In turn, someone next to them turns into a very buff Pikachu and goes prone. Again, this is totally something that could only happen in VR, but the idea of some dude dressed as Pikachu crawling around a dance floor seems like a believable thing that could happen at an anime con rave. A guy next to me says “They’re ending with one of my ambient tracks”. I didn’t get their artist name, but they said the song was called “Asteroid” when I asked them to repeat what they said as I got close enough to hear. One of the cats says “holy shit I’m running at 10 frames per second on an RTX 3070”. Same, man. Same.
The hardest part about VR raves is that they are wildly unoptimized. The next act begins playing liquid DnB music and someone next to me says “Yeah, now this I can get into, none of that dubstep shit the other guy played”. As I approached the club from the outside earlier in the night (yes, there is an outside area in the form of a back alley where there was a merch garage that had concessions in the form of avatars, Sonic The Hedgehog body pillows, and musical samples of tonight’s DJs), a greeter was telling everybody who entered the server who was using an avatar with “very poor”-labelled optimization to change into something “poor” or better so-as to not tank the FPS even lower than 10FPS in the club downstairs.
One of the cats approaches me as I’m alt-tabbed and writing that last paragraph, and I hear “Yoooooo what’s uppppp Pichuuuuu” and begin engaging in a conversation about how this game is eating my RAM too and it’s especially hard as I try to write a Medium article about the show. However, once I’m alt-tabbed for more than a few seconds, the game must go into a minimum-FPS saving mode similar to a game like Final Fantasy XIV (the hit MMROPG which now has a free trial that lets you play up to level 60 and includes the award-winning first expansion HEAVENSWARD for over 80 hours of action-packed gameplay) does where it halves the FPS to save resources while alt-tabbed.
“Stop stepping on us bro! Don’t bully us for our height!” I hear, alt-tabbing backed to see a guy dressed as Guts from Berserk (RIP Kentaro Miura) stepping all over us, tiny little avatars congregated in front of the DJ booth. A little while later, I decided to head upstairs and see what was going on. One of the stranger parts of VRChat is the ability for world makers to add visual filters to the game. This being my second club night in VRChat, it seems like a popular feature for these visual filters to be added in the form of drugs somewhere hidden in the world. At the club Loner I went to last weekend, it was fittingly in the bathroom. At SHELTER tonight, it was in the shadowy back corner of the elevator room that leads down to the club. There are still plenty of furries up here taking these tablets of virtual acid, talking about how they’re also drinking in real life.
Now that I’m upstairs and have a clear, uninterrupted conscious, let me get to the main point I want to make in this article. Back in April of this year, Team Poolside (of which I’m one of the 4 co-founders) threw a rave inside of Final Fantasy XIV. The biggest problem we ran into was the fact that despite FFXIV being free, it’s a bit inaccessible. For instance, you couldn’t just download the game (which totals at over 70gb whereas VRChat is only 700mb plus a few extra mb to download a server) and show up to the house we had the event at. In order to even access housing in FFXIV, you have to make it to level 15, which from my experience trying to get people into the game, can take fucking hours. Even still, we drew a decently sized crowd of around 30 or so to the venue and the Twitch stream peaked around 60.
In VRChat however, you need only download the game and enter the server. That’s all. And don’t let the name fool you, you don’t need a VR headset to play the game. I don’t have one, although I’m getting a bit more convinced to get one with these club nights and also my recent interest in iRacing (article on that coming soon). But you can just run VRChat on desktop mode. Having a good computer isn’t much of a problem either. I have one of the best rigs money can buy right now and this game still runs like shit in clubs like this. These points of accessibility must have a huge impact on the turnout of these events.
A dude who was literally just a human arm with the hand moving as a mouth asked why I was sitting in this room upstairs alone and I explained about this article I’m writing right now. They came back a minute or so later and asked where they could find the article, so if you actually are reading this, thanks a lot. Wish I grabbed a pic, that avatar was funny as shit.
I was floored when my friend SQ took me to Loner last Saturday and saw the turnout of people there. It was as packed as a real life club would be, and the experience was similar as well. It felt like there were people all around me, like I had to get close to SQ just to hear him. There were people around with full body tracking controls dancing in their real life rooms in real time and those movements were carrying over to their in-game avatars. The chatter of hundreds of people packed into one virtual room sounded like that of a real crowd of people. This is the point I’m trying to drive in right now. This whole situation is both somehow so beyond fucking absurd while also totally believable to an extent.
Another group of people just walked in and started silently taking pictures of me in the chair. More of their friends piled in and started taking group pics. I think I’m gonna head back down to the venue again. All I’m saying is that the world needs things like this right now, and I’m floored by the turnout for events like this. I’m pretty plugged-in online and I had never thought a scene like this existed, let alone that I had a few friends already a part of it. I’m currently in the second overflow server because the first two instances were both full. I’m not sure what the server cap is, but I believe it’s between 80–100.
My game just crashed while attempting to rejoin another instance in hopes of getting into the main server to see my friends.
I logged back into the first overflow server for a while and changed frequently between a Mr. Krabs and very tiny spider avatar. This was a very easy way to make friends. Nearly everywhere I went I was greeted with a “haha yooooo are you feeling it, Mr. Krabs?”. At one point while I was the spider, somebody was afraid they “stepped on me” and crouched down to apologize and say “you’re so cute little spider, I would never want to squash you”. I changed back to Mr. Krabs and we joined the dancing for a little while. I ended up chugging a drink over the internet with some dude who was talking about some game he wanted people to buy so it could get a sequel funded, standing next to the virtual acid tabs.
I finally made it into the main server by some stroke of luck for 2ToneDisco’s set. It’s significantly more crowded than the overflow server I found myself in early. As I arrive on the dance floor, I hear a drunken voice say “Man, this is what I’m fucking here for. 2Tone is soooo fucking crazy man.” 2Tone just started playing like a trance-DnB-eurobeat remix of Mr. Brightside (can I get a track ID on this one now too?). Personal space and not blocking somebody’s view, just like in real life, holds a lot of importance in VRChat, and I’ve thus switched to a much much smaller avatar (a copy I made of the Serval Cat avatar from earlier in the night) as I felt like Mr. Krabs was a little too large and in people’s way. Now I am very small and close to the floor. Many people might not even notice I’m here.
This game truly skews the lines between real life interaction and online interaction. It’s of course no replacement, but it’s incredible how far we’ve come where something like this can even exist, particularly in a year where we can’t be doing things like this anymore. Someone next to me by some universal coincidence just said “VRChat allows for some levels of comedy that real life simply can’t offer”. But my point being we can’t be doing things like this again in real life quite yet, so having something that resembles it more than you’d think as an onlooker is such a wild thought. Also 2ToneDisco just started playing a batshit remix of Come Together by The Beatles, of all things? Oh my god, he just blended it into a remix of FUSION by Perfume (spare a track ID, kind sir?), my favorite band in the whole fucking world. Any DJ that plays Perfume has my heart, thank you 2ToneDisco.
I’m gonna head out and enjoy the last few minutes of the rave, so I think I’m just gonna end the article here, but check out the VR club SHELTER here.
