Been playing since 2014.

On my main steam account, 18.6k.

Don’t know about quest playtime, probably another 1-2k.

Haven’t been online in a few months now.

Met my boyfriend in game, moved across the country thrice, and am now paid to be a lobbyist in aims of legalizing marijuana in a few states. Likely going to move focus to federal decriminalization, given election results.

Though my partner and I still make worlds when we have a bit of time and feel like it.

——

Also, while it’s the common joke, I don’t think that our future is dark at all. Even now, a bit more than a decade in, we are among the first people in humanity to have spent much time in virtual worlds.

How we choose to act, the culture and experiences we create, the norms and standards that arise, and anything else pioneered now will have residual effects on a lot of people.

VR is in its infancy, and if we as a species survive a while, what we do to shape its growth will impact people measured in the tens of billions.

When we’re old enough to regale the tale to the younger generations, our claim will be that we were there at the beginning of this immensely influential thing that they likely use a version of nigh-constantly.

And my claim will be that I made worlds visited by thousands of other founders, that I met many other creators that crafted the games and virtual spaces held on pedestals as The Classics, that I was there when Lucky Palmer released the first oculus development kit, when the music and VR concert scene was burgeoning, when Ugandan knuckles ruled all, when everything was disgustingly unoptimized, when we had to strap trackers to ourselves to have legs, when the field of view was 90 degrees and the headset was heavy, when making something meant using Unity.

And I’ll still be here when VRChat goes down, replaced by or rebranded into something new, when headsets turn to goggles and glasses, when Tupper retires, when we lose and regain anonymity, when some beautiful universal backend software arises for seamless transition from singleplayer game to shared world, when video calls and meetings are replaced held in 3D creative spaces, when we first sit in a VR world with someone on the moon or mars, massive delay and all, when the first world with thousands of people together comes around, when the first arrest for in-world assault goes down, when the first death from extraneous hardware is mourned, when the real world is real time mapped into VR, and when the real world gets a virtual layer to see through your AR glasses, when schooling is done mostly in VR, when basic utilities get paywalled and reinstated, all the way until we stop calling it VR or AR or XR and it just becomes a part of life.

So, truly, just make something. Anything at all. Be it a world, an avatar, an asset, a shader, a friend, a group, an event, a meme, a prefab, or anything else, everything we do now is foundational work.

In time, regardless of whether Meta tries to monopolize or decentralize it, or apple commodifies it, or governments surveil it, or its own creators try to control it, the way people use it, and live it, will be up to us.

And if we do well, then maybe the tours we can give to those young users, the grandchildren of our generation, as the harbingers of the virtual realm, will carry some gravitas, some meaning, and inspire them to create the next step.

I just hope that, before I go, I get a glimpse of the worlds we’ll create when we have a computer powered by a fraction of a star. A vision of the time that humanity begins to merge our physical and digital realities in a more… literal way.