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>a kind of place where people could do really extreme things you could never possibly get away with in real life, i.e. gladiator battles, just getting murdered

>a kind of place where people could do really extreme things you could never possibly get away with in real life, i.e. gladiator battles, just getting murdered over and over, extreme sex and partying with no consequences The future is now. Welcome to VRChat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUqFFj5ePE&t=180s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUqFFj5ePE&t=180s VRChat is full of escapism, alchohol abuse, underage users, and explicit erotic roleplay. The latter typically involves nude avatars with full-body tracking using HTC Vive trackers. By the way, this game is free without age restrictions on Oculus Quest, a product which itself has no parental controls. VRChat has no system for filtering or proactively tagging NSFW content, so even users who opt-out of the private adult worlds will probably still see nudity and more in public worlds. Also, vulnerabilities in the official client (mostly in the Unity rendering pipeline and Photon RPC stack) means users of modded clients can crash others' PC or Quest from inside the game. "Crashers", as they're known to all longtime users, have been a problem for years with no solution in sight. In earlier versions of VRChat, users could attach arbitrary C# scripts to their custom uploaded worlds or avatars. At least one arbitrary remote execution vulnerability has been discovered and responsibly disclosed to VRChat: https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xz33p/hackers-hijacked-vr-chatrooms-to-manipulate-users-reality https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xz33p/hackers-hijacked-vr-c... The VRChat staff ostensibly review moderation requests for issues like hate speech or nudity in public lobbies, but each video clip I've included (as the report guidelines strongly recommend) in requests I've filed has 0 views per my video upload dashboard. I keep seeing many of the same perpetrators again and again in public worlds. Again, there are no age checks, even good-faith "enter your birthdate" dialogs, and this platform is full of suggestive and explicit NSFW content. Communication is mainly via voice chat, so children are highly visible to adult users who would abuse them, who sadly are also present on the platform. Unsupervised kids are all over the place in this game. VRChat moderation staff do not have any in-game presence. Despite these issues, VRChat continues to grow due to the total creative freedom it offers for user-uploaded content, its popularity among content creators on YouTube e.g. Jameskii, HeyImBee, SwaggerSouls, and the fact that it's a free game on Quest. It recently topped 50,000 concurrent active users. Advanced VRChat users have modded support for teledildonics, as one streamer describes in this safe-for-work YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekUZoSiZV_I&t=19s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekUZoSiZV_I&t=19s

throwawaysea 5y ago
I did not realize that VRChat is still around. I only ever heard of it in the context of Ugandan Knuckles, a meme that was short lived but extremely hilarious and also offensive to some. If you don’t know what I am talking about, you can search for it on YouTube (example: https://youtu.be/eix7fLsS058 https://youtu.be/eix7fLsS058). I have never used VRChat but as an outsider it reminds me a bit of the old Internet before Web 2.0 and before everything became political.
- neartheplain 5y ago
  Ugandan Knuckles was most users' introduction to VRChat. It's been a dead meme for a while, but that doesn't stop 9-year-old kids from running up to strangers in VR yelling, "Do you kno dae wae?" Aside from the risk to the children themselves, their presence in VRChat is a constant annoyance to adults. They tend to be loud and lack manners or social skills. If you meet an interesting stranger and strike up a conversation, some kid'll run up in your face mid-sentence to shout lines from Ugandan Knuckles or a TikTok meme. Ever since the great "Quest-mas" of December 2020, VRChat public lobbies have felt more and more like an unsupervised daycare. VRChat's Terms of Service specificy a minimum age of 13 for COPPA compliance, but in practice it seems this is never enforced, and I'm not even sure how it could be. It's really a shame, as aside from the kids and "crashers," VRChat's total creative freedom is a breath of fresh air. If you can model something in Blender and export it as Unity project, you can upload it to VRChat. There's a huge range of beautiful and immersive custom worlds, and all sort of hilarious or impressive custom avatars. It's a new digital Wild West, with all the good and bad that metaphor entails.

throwawaysea 5y ago

I did not realize that VRChat is still around. I only ever heard of it in the context of Ugandan Knuckles, a meme that was short lived but extremely hilarious and also offensive to some. If you don’t know what I am talking about, you can search for it on YouTube (example: https://youtu.be/eix7fLsS058 https://youtu.be/eix7fLsS058). I have never used VRChat but as an outsider it reminds me a bit of the old Internet before Web 2.0 and before everything became political.

neartheplain 5y ago
Ugandan Knuckles was most users' introduction to VRChat. It's been a dead meme for a while, but that doesn't stop 9-year-old kids from running up to strangers in VR yelling, "Do you kno dae wae?" Aside from the risk to the children themselves, their presence in VRChat is a constant annoyance to adults. They tend to be loud and lack manners or social skills. If you meet an interesting stranger and strike up a conversation, some kid'll run up in your face mid-sentence to shout lines from Ugandan Knuckles or a TikTok meme. Ever since the great "Quest-mas" of December 2020, VRChat public lobbies have felt more and more like an unsupervised daycare. VRChat's Terms of Service specificy a minimum age of 13 for COPPA compliance, but in practice it seems this is never enforced, and I'm not even sure how it could be. It's really a shame, as aside from the kids and "crashers," VRChat's total creative freedom is a breath of fresh air. If you can model something in Blender and export it as Unity project, you can upload it to VRChat. There's a huge range of beautiful and immersive custom worlds, and all sort of hilarious or impressive custom avatars. It's a new digital Wild West, with all the good and bad that metaphor entails.