I’m going to say some words. theses are not of the moment, but are of *a* moment, wherein I keep thinking, “i should post this…” and then decide to back away.
well, hittin’ post
(inb4 someone on bluesky posts something snarky like, “lol im not reading words about the scene im experiencing it dropping real ones in the streets” or something so crunched out i can’t even begin to understand the message)
When I first entered the VRChat music scene, it was pretty common to aggressively police folks for not “following the rules.” They’d be posted in a Discord somewhere, or on some big sign when you entered an instance. Things like having an optimized avatar, not yapping in front of the DJ, or not generally being a nuisance.
Typical things!
Then, when things started to spread out a bit – when Loner and Shelter came to prominence – things stopped being codified, and started being sort of unspoken norms, more akin to IRL underground music culture (regardless of genre), where maybe someone would tap you on the shoulder, but you wouldn’t see something posted anywhere. You wouldn’t see a Discord rules page, but you could be absolutely sure someone would let you know.
In short, events weren’t policed, nor was there a system in place for, “folks to know what the rules are.” You had to feel them out. You had to make relationships and talk to people. And if someone did tell you, it was more of, hey, here’s how things are here. Or, to put it another way: things were structured to preserve a certain vibe and culture, leaning toward community.
For example: front-row yapping.
If you were talking a lot near the DJ, someone would generally say something to you. You’d be asked nicely first (usually). Then, if you kept going, you’d get the stink eye and a passive aggressive, “hey, wow, it’s so cool to have a conversation at a music event when people are trying to listen,” said just within earshot.
“No talking,” wasn’t posted anywhere, because that wasn’t true. It was a cultural expectation of the place you were existing in to learn and understand the rules, even if they weren’t posted.
Another example: performance.
How is it that, in 2021, with worse hardware, I was able to go to music events of the same size and have a better framerate than I do today, despite a more optimized VRChat and a way better PC?
It’s pretty clear, IMO, what happened: as VRChat introduced more ways to customize your experience (vram limits, size limits for worlds) and world creators introduced new systems (isolating your voice, creating muffled areas) a community naturally aligned with personal choice and identity leaned on the side of expression over continuity of experience. As hardware got better, folks started taking a nonchalant attitude: hey, I got 20 frames before, so what’s the difference now?
Now, we all just joke about Tupper taking people to task for it – because he’s the only one left that’ll do it.
The same could be said for a billion different things: avatar sizes, light settings, emoji usage, walking through people – whatever.
Over time, more and more new folks came in, and because there wasn’t as much need to “enforce” the old norms, they simply stopped being a thing. Likewise, whereas doing something against “VR social norms” would’ve made you a pariah (you would get people up your ass and know, just by the attitude of the folks near you, that you were doing something you shouldn’t), after this mass influx, it was a lot easier to basically just treat the space not like a space, and the community not like a community.
To be clear, this isn’t a, “new people in community bad,” post! It’s more about the mechanics of how change happens, and how it happens slowly, and without anyone really immediately noticing.
I think a lot of people – at least from casually having conversations – aren’t big fans of this, but no one wants to do the thing the “other” (see: eboy adjacent) side of the music scene does, which is to say, no one wants to have people walking around enforcing things because that’s not cool. And, honestly, they’re right! That kind of thing ruins the vibe. What kinda person wants to be a “VR bouncer” anyway? I can hear the sorta people who would probably read a post like this groaning and making a face.
In order for the right vibe, those norms have to exist and come from the people attending, they can’t just be forced on the experience, nor be “enforced” by bouncers. They must be community driven. Social norm setting is different from social policing. “Policing,” as a concept, doesn’t work in these sorts of spaces – the sorts of people drawn to them will just simply never do that. But norm setting? Cooking up a vibe? That is the language and philosophy behind basically every community in the “VR rave” scene.
But it only works if you’re actually setting the vibe.
There’s no sign saying, “Pick someone up when they fall in the pit.” There’s no sign saying, “Don’t use your phone in the front row.” There’s also no sign that says, “If you see someone grabbing at someone crowd surfing, punch them in the dick then kick them out.” Alas, those are the rules and everyone picks up on them. The security guy might throw you out of the metal show, but it’s only because 10 other sweaty people dragged you there.
I think people will perceive all of these words as me being some VRChat oldhead and complaining about the way things are now – but I honestly don’t have a big problem with it. Things change! I think, though, that something was lost that was important here, and I think a lot of folks will find this particular take cringe because it’s one of those things you say to your friends but you don’t say out loud.
Anyway, I’m interested in this for two reasons:
1:
I think part of the problem is that (digital) social problems are tempting to solve with mechanical, “software” solutions. I think that social behavior, though, is more difficult to predict and people have a tendency to see a problem and think the answer is to force people to behave in a certain way, when in turn, this ends of making a problem worse or fundamentally breaks a social system that creates a new, but different problem (or slowly erodes at a community’s “norm enforcement” muscle, eventually letting it atrophy).
Basically, yes, it’s a lot of work for a community to have to enforce things like avatar sizes, people talking too much, people being “afk” in the middle of a dancefloor, people bouncing through people on desktop, folks littering prints or stickers everywhere, but by not doing these things and instead putting software systems in place, I think something important is lost.
In this way, I think (once again) there’s a definite difference between individuals setting standards for their community that they enforce as a matter of belonging in that space vs. a hulking dude telling you CHANGE AVATAR OR YOU’RE KICKED.
I also think it’s a healthy skill to learn. It means conflict might happen. But that’s okay. Do it for your community. Because it’s yours. And a little conflict in VRChat – learning to deal with shitty people that don’t respect your space in general – is healthy. Stick up for yourself, man. “B-b-but I’m a b–,” no, stop. You’re an adult. Unc is gonna glare at you if you can’t tell the waitress she got your order wrong.
Or, to put it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1wUg9HCODU&t=1065s
It’s always better when what is normal comes from within a community itself (as in, the people within it, not just “organizers,” “staff,” or “community leaders,”) in an organic way. When something is systematized, it becomes an external hostile force, and is something that people will work around – and by definition becomes something that is no longer based in the community.
Addendum/aside: Of course, these thoughts are my own and not that of my employer, so don’t take them as “official policy” (or any of this, for that matter)!
With that boilerplate out of the way: I think that some systems could help, clearly, however even if they do the end result is that dependence on said systems will cause problems. More on that in a second!
Also, lowkey, systems will always be met with hostility by some folks. Without a doubt, a system that would, say, not let folks outside of certain performance qualifiers join an instance, would lead to discussion on those performance metrics being “incorrect,” because of edge cases.
Worse, there would also likely be discourse that would be veiled in the most irritating language possible: folks using terminology around justice, freedom, liberty, etc., simply because of a selfishness and and unwillingness to realize that their choice to not optimize has a very real effect on others. If only someone let them know. You gotta let ‘em know…
2:
I think the community let this particular muscle – the one that fundamentally makes you go up to people and be socially awkward, polite (at first, before, telling them to fuck off) – atrophy. For most, I think they’d wish this muscle was vestigial, and they basically treat it as such.
I think when you do that, when you stop lifting that weight, you either stop entirely… or you move to the past of least resistance.
In this space, that path is via social networks: a megaphone with a large reach with built-in social pressure for those within your carefully catalogued network and/or those with “skin in the game” (via desire to look cool, or a need to perform a role for the sake of maintaining their comfort and/or holding on to the thing that was lost previously).
That is to say, you’ll see “norms enforcement” happen in VRChat communities, but it comes not from user-to-user interaction, but from some sort of callout post on a public forum (see: Twitter, Bluesky, etc).
This is understandable, in a lot of ways: some behavior is seen as abhorrent, and when we encounter that sort of thing, we don’t want to walk over to the person and slap their hand, we want to blast them and make sure that other folks in our communities are safe. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, but I do think it’s notable that the rate of this happening has increased, when the rate “norms policing” in “person to person” interactions has decreased.
(Additionally, when we deeply avoid the little conflict – when we let that muscle get too weak – we just let ourselves boil over. Psychologically, on an individual level, avoiding any and all conflict does not mean your anger or issues are avoided. They’re just getting bottled up. Someone – or something – blowing up periodically is a prime sign that conflict is being deeply avoided.)
Fundamentally, it feels like Velatix predicted the future, in a weird way, but maybe not quite the way he probably expected (or maybe he did? I dunno, it’s like morning there, I ain’t messaging him and bothering him with my rambling). We became uncomfortable with one sort of direct confrontation, so instead we decided to use the only one any person on the internet has gotten used to: the public callout and/or the passive aggressive anonymous post.
Once again: I’m not yelling at anyone expressing their distaste however they please!
I think what I’m trying to articulate here is difficult, because I can preemptively see someone being very angry that I would dare write any of this, because how would you solve it. And I think that’s the problem: I don’t think there’s a “solve,” so much as this is about how communities work, what methods they use to maintain their existence, and what is effective and what is not for maintaining the essence of a place.
Perhaps this is a subtle, and it’s too subtle to matter and these thoughts are the ramblings of a 36-year-old failed academic who hasn’t had a chance to flush their dumb thoughts into a video essays in two fucking years, but idk, it seems to be important to me!
But, perhaps I can just write this out in plain language:
As a community grows, people tend to get tired of dealing with people not following the unspoken rules, and they don’t want to bother people – or they simply don’t want to have to waste their precious time on “modding.” So, instead, they create systems to do so for them, and then sit back and let the thing do its job. That, or they give up entirely: it’s just avatar performance, I can block them anyway, it’s not a big deal. And so on…
These systems work at first, but systems are not humans – new people misunderstand the intent of systems and will work around them (audio falloff -> make world volume lower, people louder), and then because the system exists, will not actually modify their behavior. This is true even in cases where there’s no maliciousness: there is no norm enforcement by people, so how should they know? Reading vibes only works when there is a vibe.
Likewise, maintaining that vibe requires effort – when you give up, when you end up trying to use systems like the above, you lose the ability over time to actually create that vibe, and have to resort to other systems to do so. They are cathartic, they are effective, but they don’t actually change anything, especially because they are often bullhorns that simply reinforce what vibe people want with other people that already agree and want the same vibe.
Or, to once again be normal about this shit and not write in a weird obtuse academic way: the other 50,000 or whatever people that visit this space have no idea any of this shit happened, and won’t in a week, and because it isn’t present in the places they are and exist in, the only thing it does is offer catharsis, followed by exhaustion, of everyone involved.
Catharsis, while useful, is not the same as participation. Participation involves listening, evolving, and putting forth your own effort.
Good spaces require good effort – from everyone. Low effort spaces decay over time, because everyone expects someone else to do the heavy lifting. There’s a difference between a community and an event. Very few places in the rave scene – or elsewhere – have developed community. Most folks are just running events.
Events aren’t bad, but they end up becoming things where the vibe is dictated by systems (software-based or larger, use your noggin) and not people.
Finally: while I’ve focused on correcting bad things by telling people to stop, there’s an entirely different side to this, too: praising those that put the work in, the people who will tell people that their avatar is bad… and then tell them, patiently and politely, how to fix it. Community is built in many ways. If you read, “norms enforcement” as purely “enforcement,” then you’re missing the point, big dog.
Anyway, these thoughts are scattered and not written well, but I had to get these things out of my dome before they melted my neurons. bye