We Met in Virtual Reality (2022)

Joe Hunter's lockdown based glimpse into a few places and people in VRChat, unlike the earlier two documentaries, never leaves the VR world. We never see the real-life bodies and faces of the people profiled. In this way, the documentary seems to be proposing that we can leave behind our born embodiments to live our lives (or "live our lives"?) in VR.

Of course, it may be easier for minors to abandon real life, and the people profiled here seem to be mostly Gen Z, and certainly strike one as young, possibly in many cases High School students or recent grads. If they were also stuck in their parents' homes in lockdown, they may indeed often have been able to spend many hours a day in a virtual world without having to figure out how to feed their IRL bodies or have any other major real life responsibilities that might make it hard to develop so fully in the VR world. In the case of a few of them, we hear about IRL aspects of their lives that do sound serious. For instance, one of them has had a baby.

Compared to the gloomy vibe in Danilovic's millennial-era documentary about women struggling to hold themselves together while managing real world responsibilities and escaping for awhile into a fantasy that seems closer to the world they grew up dreaming of, the world depicted in We Met in Virtual Reality seems fairly upbeat, almost utopian at times. Though one might still feel a certain sadness lurking behind the uplift. I can imagine this sadness being associated with the isolation of lockdown but also maybe the loss of one's supposed coming of age as a physical person and not just a cartoon figure on a screen. There's also a kind of toughness in more than one sense to the feel of these young people having to try to take care of themselves, in this world they've created. Still, I feel an overall positivity here. It can sometimes feel maybe a little bit forced; but good for them! This strikes me (a boomer) not unlike some of the effort made to maintain a positive and cheerful outlook by Gen Z people IRL. (If that sounds weird, you should have seen how negative young people could be in the 20th century, usually with much less to be bummed out about than the stuff we're dealing with now.)

As in Second Skin, some of the "players" in VRChat get involved with one another "romantically." But unlike in the 2008 documentary we don't see them getting together in the physical world. One couple does reportedly do so, and says they are into it, and want to get together IRL when the lockdown ends (the two couples that are mainly focused on both live very far away from one another, like the people in Second Skin who hook up IRL despite the distance between them).

Most of the VR spaces we see in this documentary feel relatively wholesome and sanitized, maybe even a bit childish- or adolescent, though the girls are almost all kitted out in an objectification-forward Japanese anime sort of style (short-shorts and stay-ups), and the guys remain comparatively taciturn and six-packed. Other people, though, are furries, giant birds, or even present themselves as abstract shapes. Perhaps this was the alternative gamer-y oasis these people managed to create virtually during the terrible days of the pandemic and the general malaise of these times. Or maybe it's a glimpse of a future detached from our physical limitations - a better world away from reality? Is that possible? Practically speaking?

The documentary feels quite hyperreal to me, despite the fact that many of the people profiled come across as genuine and thoughtful human beings. As a person with more than a foot still stuck in embodied reality, I found it frustrating never to see what any of them are like outside of VRChat; and also I wish I could find some follow-up on where those "characters" are at now, whether IRL or still in VRChat. There is no explicit commentary, and little insight into these people as also existing as three-dimensional creatures in the real world.

Looking forward to hearing about your own experiences and thoughts on what you see in these documentaries in the discuission board!