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Culture Projects

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Creating

Unity game engine icon and Blender modeling software icon.

Hubs

🌎 Worlds

🤼 Avatars

  • A starting point read, a community tutorial video series, and broad overview
  • If you want popular existing bases to build on (mostly paid), Tahvo's furry species and Parzeval's anime avatar overviews
  • Otherwise searching “where to find models for vrchat” seems to be replete with results, mind licenses!
  • Trying to find different kinds of avatar makers that perform a progression with an audience like iDream! Closest I've found is this series, but I would personally advise limiting if not muting the audio (this entry might be the least grating). You can definitely see a trend since 3.0 came out I think, where past avatar highlights were often restricted to epic scale and particles. (Might explain why I still see rules against avatars using such explosions of light and sound despite really not having seen them used in 2022.) Very open if anyone would like to suggest an alternate channel though, this here is a very… acquired taste.
  • A community wiki called VRCLibrary + two collections of personal and community shader knowledge
  • A knowledge index and another manifest of aforementioned decentralized resources
  • Footnote from CNLohr’s video: endorsed UdonSharp, CyanEmu, VRWorldToolkit

Past Journeys

1. My entry point for learning about this scene before I'd joined VRChat was the above video "My Year in VRChat" by CNLohr, which left me equally fascinated and stumped. How do I find a group of people inside a game when their work is by nature outside the game in their Unity or Blender program? Aside from bumping into creators by pure luck, so far my personal go-to source has been to either attend or watch stream recordings for:

2. Appreciating that in VRChat, learning to create's largely a decentralized effort. You'll rarely find a single silver-bullet tutorial to point to, esp. with so many official and fan resources growing stale or deprecated. Instead, experienced creators are often happy to talk shop with someone who's respectfully asked for help in an appropriate Discord channel.

3. Finding my creative aesthetic born out of my values ✳

4. Decided through a lengthy period of self-searching to redirect from Creating-first to Connecting-first, but here were some groups I'll note what frontiers lie open that I didn't really get deep into:

  • Poiyomi (YouTube tutorials, Patreon, has a Discord server for itself)
  • UdonSharp (creator's been hired by VRChat, so... #udon-questions in official VRC Discord now?)
  • VRCPrefabs (seemed a bit less easy to get into, but I see the logo in many notable worlds) aka "the Prefabs community."

Future Journeys

  • I still can’t help but wonder what might exist outside the English-speaking community’s bubble?
  • Japanese creator communities: VRCUnity, World Creators Index (sites on bios)
  • I've also seen creators at Community Meetup's event affiliated with e.g. VRC-Italy or VRCFrance

Section Credits

Thanks for help on this section: Faxmashine, pema99, Joker is punk, iDreamTheater, and the Discord communities at communitymeetup.net, StemVR, and VRCLibrary.

Back to Top

Exploring

Silhouette of a person about to enter through a portal.

‍

Hubs

Outside the Game

A list of Discord channels that correspond to this Discord community's breakdown of different world types: adventure-worlds, club-and-dance-worlds, exploration-worlds, festive-worlds, game-worlds, hang-out-worlds, horror-worlds, sleep-worlds, unique-concept-worlds, meme-and-big-yikes-worlds-enter-them-at-your-own-risk.

Inside the Game

  • Worlds keyword search: with the 2.0 UI update, suggests a random list of keywords to explore!
  • Worlds > Random: bear in mind world quality can vary wildly! Same goes for the…
  • Worlds > Community Labs: enabled via checkbox under your user settings
  • Sometimes you’ll find worlds created to curate creators’ portals, like these!
  • Peek the bio of any friends on green/blue social status to see the world they’re in
  • Ask users whose rank shows they've been around a while for worlds to try out,
    e.g. users you meet in a Labs world, as they’re likely to worldhop a lot!

Past Journeys

  • My entry point: pretty much just opening my Worlds menu as a first-time player!
  • One of my earliest ways I sought after exploration-motivated players was to tail posts I ran into online that called for “adventurers” to join them... At this point it's led into several branches and continues to baffle me!
    -- First, there’s a group led by a filmmaker-type that seems to maybe somewhat overlap the Avatar PvP domain, maybe just be about world exploring, and/or maybe have a focus on more JRPG-system creations like Luxerion World?... Could possibly be that the flexibility is a choice made deliberately to deflate what might incite drama in other more standardized communities.
    -- However, trying to follow other groups that don’t come from that angle seems to suggest they do things differently, e.g. potentially focusing on exchanging merit badges for achievements?
    -- The first group’s filmmaker leader fella also alluded to at least one other EN group as well as a possible group over on the JP community side of things they’d term “an adventuring group.”
    -- There was that one banner at Vket 2022S, too. +___+ I think my personal need for curious closure is working against me to a comedic degree here…
  • Kadaflix & xChill: weird out-of-body train in shiny land, scaling Cave Story’s great “Outer Wall” climb (my 1st experience with private worlds!)
Image of the Outer Wall from Cave Story world from VRChat with a vertical orientation, zoomed out to emphasize the scale of how tall up you had to climb. A wall of gray stone against the moon and clouds of the game Cave Story.
  • ORB: amazing to see the lengths to which a shitpost can become its own event and fan following. Also made me realize VRChat is a lot bigger on the inside than outside when it comes to its six degrees of separation: we went to a fancy wall walking world called The Sphere and I was amused at the long time players who didn't get anything out of the name whereas I saw it and immediately was sweating having seen CyanLaser all up and down the tech side of VRC by that point... crazy was going to result, and, yes. 🙂 Shockingly it might still not have been the craziest world that night, albeit by a thin margin! Because [this one] was truly something else.
  • Had recent need to collect big categories like that Safari server's image above: Google spreadsheet result.
  • Creating an ever-WIP personal hubworld to catalog some important memories
  • Joining the Explore VRChat community
  • Creating a tour to show Discord friends why someone might fall so deeply into VRChat
  • Helping lead a "guild" that explores "adventure worlds" (anything too long for a typical worldhop!)
  • Focused exploration on puzzle worlds, possible blog angle of the different vibes you get from involving others vs. soloing them + experiences with successive generations of hint-givers adjusting how cryptic they are
  • I'm generally breaking up my worldhopping into things I encountered through gatherings, cozy hangouts, and game activities. Then I have this for what I encounter by myself with a corresponding backlog!
  • I've found that I like to hop avatar worlds primarily when I can show up to an event with a themed avatar, and sometimes it's fun to find an on-theme world or worlds for say a watch party to worldhop to afterwards!
  • But it's also recently been a fun way to engage with avatar worlds by finding those that indicate a community of their users to learn more about, e.g. your Booth avatars (with their subsets like Rusks, Rindos, Kons), furry avatars (e.g. these, or JP-style kemono ones) Hoppou avatars -- I've seen some creators even have meetups for users of their avatars!
  • Worldhopping methods I like: offering to worldhop for hangers-on after an event has wrapped up and we're all just standing around, or setting up a Group instance as another event lets out (latter works best if you're in a Group whose community you've all friended each other, as can help them then see you in their sidebar's Friend Locations). Sometimes the latter can be further aided by broadcasting you've set up a Group instance as you're going worldhopping, too!

Future Journeys

  • Updating the past journeys list as it's a bit outdated, hahaha
  • Chasing down those other adventuring groups as I've since become stubborn enough to start one in my home community OTL
  • Search for worldhop, worldhopper, worldhopping, explorer, exploring in the Groups finder!
  • so many, thanks to discovering the above methods..

Section Credits

Credit for this section to: fellow worldhoppers and content creators mentioned above. Especially huge thanks to Explore VRChat and the VRCList webadmin Nova for the services that provides, also the latter has a Patreon if you'd like to help support it!

Sharing

Icon of the silhouettes of two people facing each other and reaching out connecting hands.

Hubs

Sorting in rough order of what I've personally found most practical:

Past Journeys

  • Ancients of VRChat (NA) – 18+ Player Community I started into by signing up for the weekly Newbie Night and Game Night events and crossed my fingers, unsure how it’d go! But at present? It's arguably become like a home base for me! As one person's put it: "It can be difficult to find your tribe, so to speak, presently -- but if you're older and that's why you feel out of place, this is a pretty great group to join!"
  • Virtual Relics – also took a brief peek over at this sister server for EU players, very welcoming.
  • StemVR – moved to Lessons for their primary focus on educational topics. 👍
  • Working through the hubs of Discord servers, the bulk of which I admittedly don't click with… I believe due to most being relatively more on the joiner to keep inserting themselves. Unless it's a server around an activity that happens regularly beyond solely an unfocused chitchat group.
  • Those are great and all, but also a dime a dozen, many either in their own bubble or a ghost town. I have found a few gems at least! (Mostly in other sections of this log!)
  • One change I didn't expect was how I began passing on some servers altogether due to waning energy to stay open-minded. Felt eerily like reviewing a stack of job ads or resumes. So I might space server joins out where possible... at least with specialized ones I want to give the best chance of clicking with me. Worried about being too clinical and detached!
  • VRCon’s 2021 “community festival” visited nearly a year later: world filled with 100+ group booths! The liminal vibe walking through a ghost town despite it being a year young, making me very curious if we will get another this year, or if there were ones in years past? And if so, what names stick around most... at first the space seemed not too crazy, but actually ended up taking several nights to catalog down all the groups! It really gives me a lot of insight into the strands of EN-side content I see in 2022.
  • Something of concern: how easy it will be to get in and out of feeling out whether a group clicks with me? There are a few categories (mostly in Roleplays) that seem tied to long term commitments... might be smarter to scope those out by viewing Twitch streams/VODs? The milsim / avatar PvP and the "mystery school" both feel like cool concepts for creating fresh ideas (relative to most things I've seen out of other user generated content games and social VR platforms) but heavily raise that commitment question for me as I feel like there is a high chance I bounce off them personally
  • huh, so, in the VRCon booths, there's a "The Wanderer" house that just goes to a map, no discord or twitter. Feels very "why get a booth?" But seeking up the name, I found an ARG-tier rabbit hole from searching up that name -> its content creator -> the inn’s hashtag -> an avatar maker I had just encountered for the first time at the community roundup just that weekend!
  • I even then found an old name of a streamer I knew from my past life as a viewer in the vtuber community years ago. I'm guessing it was back when they streamed VRChat, who was talking to the old owner of the vrchat maps/safari server back prior to the current owner TheKally.
  • Organizing a tour + adventure meetup for my Discord friends who saw me spending too much time on VRChat
  • patterns of things I've seen people host either in communities or with friends: Nights to play game worlds or sing at karaoke together; Media watch parties and music listening parties; Gatherings for meditation, musicmaking, drawing together, interest-sharing, book clubs; a variety of mixers for birthdays, for newcomers, for non-newcomers; Just generally broadcast an activity you're doing because you're interested in it with or without others! It can have a structure to it, e.g. something where everyone gets a turn to go, or just unstructured chaos, whatever works for you!

Future Journeys

<disclaimer> These aren’t vetted for quality yet and so have had Discord invite links pulled. I fully encourage doing individual research, e.g. consider using a throwaway to check a server out first. Just either names that came up semi-regularly, or, had personal interest to me. </disclaimer>

From my survey of the VRCon 2021 community festival world’s booths:

  • Creator Collectives: Merry Men (meme avatar makers), Art-Avatars (primary furry focus), @OfficialArtifex ("Artifex Talent Tree" on YT), Laughing Lizard, GenshinVR (avatar makers), VRCValve (import/recreation effort), @VRosity (same on YT), VRCTraders
  • Filmmaking: @TheVRFA, VRChat Rewind "2020+1" (didn't release…?)
  • Isolated Premises: Happy Hill therapy worlds (Orbis Unum LLC), VRC Car Community, @ExploreVRChat (2023 edit: initial impressions here, now my secondary community after Ancients!), podcast @BucketListVR, EN/JP Language Exchange, Cult of Jar (murder support and game nights), VR Worlds Safari (now led by streamer TheKally), StemVR+MoVART, the social anxiety club "NoFriendsFriendsClub" (Friday night streams by OkayKuro, idea from the "Hagani" anime), @FemboyCamp, VRChat Italia (Official), Laserdome (for the popular lasertag world), @max_recovery annual charity events since 2018 (MystcianCyan + Profit Lemon), VRChat Escape Project aka VRCE Project (does the VRCE:## map series), VRC Kmart. For RP groups,  this iceberg video indicates 3 styles: informal, formal, combat.
  • Dance: VR Dance Academy founded by user dustydustbunny (self-presented here and interviewed here!) – a peek led me to also find IDA Official [1] [2] (founded by jjfx-multimedia)
  • Furry: I would probably just watch streams rather than go personally for their stuff until I can experience and appreciate the vibe a bit better?
  • Improv: Legacy Improv Team, Entertainer's Guild @TEGVrc (multiple open mic worlds), GobsImprov.com, also Munchies' stream
  • Mute: Tadayoshi's Phantom Touch(?) Community Garden, MrDummy_NL Sign & Fun (cooperates w/HH), and Helping Hands (VR Sign Language variations, lesson site, lesson VODs - daily classes for free, 3k+ mem, also weekly movie/game/club social events)
  • Official VRC Discord’s "community-servers" channel: Cult of Jar, Hololive VRC, Undernet, Snowdinverse, StemVR, 2017ers, mil-sims (army RPs), Half-Life 2 RP, VR Mystery School, furry servers, VRCon, VRC Traders (avy buyers, but also "for those wanting to learn"?), Laughing Lizard (creators/raves/events, see "6G Experience" world), SCP sim, Merry Men (shitpost avatars/memes but they are creators), HorrorConVR, Rollthered's creators, Star Wars Clonetroopers, Poiyomi Shaders (I've seen a couple friends mention this discord too--holy wow that member count), Gob's Improv Emporium ("previously VRChat Improv"), the Purple Lotus (the freeform RP worlds), Midnight Munchies Manifesto ("open mic style talent show"), Loli-Police RP sim, Town of Salem (for the gameworld), VRC EN-JP Language Exchange.
  • Furry outside VRCon: main 3 seem to be FurLounge (“chill”), Furry Talk and Chill (“small”), and FurHub (“rowdy”)? I wonder if a visitor could tell the difference. Muted players allegedly accepted more vs. other hangouts? Later also learned about the Furality convention from friends, which while I couldn't attend streamed its panels to their Twitch and have put recordings on that linked YouTube!
  • Language Learning: moved to its own sections on the Lessons section!
  • VRChat in other countries: Japan, Germany, Italy, France; I've seen Discord servers around – but a short glance at Twitch and YouTube shows more and more players from different offline cultures!
  • VRC Speech to Text
  • Dancing Communities: see bottom of Clubs for a video presented by several such groups!
  • Somewhat also migrating this to the Lessons page having gotten a bit further into them \o/
  • Avatar raid groups (e.g. Kitten Marching Band + Hoppou community booths spotted in VRCon 2021-2022), although to a point I wonder if that just ends up counting as roleplay...?
  • updating what I've been able to visit from the above, also community-servers is a bit out of date
  • https://vrclist.com/communities
  • more subreddit community finding posts I haven't gotten to
  • oh yeah and Groups now exist since I wrote all this oof

Section Credits

Credit for this section to: communities mentioned above and the content creators covering them.

Clubs

Icon of a DJ over a turntable with music notes around their head.

Hubs

  • VRChatPartyHub, bonus glance at their Discord at the time of writing in summer 2022:
List of clubs from VRChatPartyHub's channel list, some names abbreviated, as of summer 2022: 1042, 7-Sins-DJ-Society, 7th-Dimension, Alcoholics-Unani..., Andromeda, Asylum, Audacity, Avianse, Bad-Bot-Corp, Bad-Peaches, Beat-Syndicate, BUNKER, Cannon-Cove, Club-808, Club-Bifrost, Club-Color, Club-Domain, Club-Fracture, Club-Limbo, Club-Melody, Club-O, Club-Poseidon, Club-Quartz, Club-Reality, Club-Rebellion, DanceDanceVR, Dieselworks, Dreaming-Reality, Drinkers-and-Dancers, Ethos-and-Mistakes, EXE, Focus-Entertainment, HARDBOX, Heist, Himitsu-Blind, Intermodal, ju-no, Just-Party, Kawaii-till-I-die, Loli-Squad, Loud-Studios, Lyoko, Miami-Vice-Parties, Millkox-Events, Monochrome, MUZZ, Nucleus, NullVR, Nyxs-Abyss, OnlyLoveFam, Plantasia-The-Gar..., QNode-Club, RAGEHAUZ, RTTG, Resonance, Rizumu-Dance-Community, Scuff-Bois, _Shelter, Slyfest-Squad, SpookyNinja-Prod..., SodaWorld, Subhive, Sunday-Brunch, STARVRC, SYZYGY, TailBass-VR, TARTARUS, The-Alleyway, The-Dark-Horse, The-Dice, The-Fishbowl, The-Hangar-Bay-Co..., The-House-Club, The-Party-Zone, The-Station, TJs-Tavern, Tube-VR, Vanguard, VR-Palace, VAULTAGE, Vibe-Tribe-VR, Virtual-Relics, WCKD, Wolf-Intelligence, ZD-Underground.
  • VRChatMusicEventCalendar Twitter bot, seemingly similar to the above but for JP-based events!
  • VRCC, will note that the way it loads events will regularly lag my phone/computer when scrolling!

Past Journeys

I've finally written 2022's stories + reflections I've had since starting VRChat on the gap between watching others talk about VRChat clubs vs. the reality of joining as an outsider new to it all! It covers, among others:

Picture of Club Orion glowstick pickupables that form a "T" on the left and a "Y" on the right.

Newer past journeys since what the above first blog saga covers:

  • Cannon Cove -- the best place I've found for rock and metal, even a goofy 00s emo night. Be mindful that they host both SFW and NSFW (18+) events; but, they make a clear distinction between the two by changing between instances if one follows the other.
VRChat world made to look like a metal album cover, aptly named TheMetalZone.

Newly encountered documentaries and videos since the time of that blog saga:

  • Decided that I also just generally don't care to steal seats from very competitive venues like SANCTUM or GHOSTCLUB at this point!

Future Journeys

Trying more of the clubs from those above intel hubs! Examples:

  • CONTACT, Kawaii Till I Die (link in its channel on VRCPartyHub), Rave Till the Grave, Resonance (sometimes just referred to as their maps, e.g. M4L1C3/Claustrophobia), M.A.S.S. - lower priority to Concrete (has nsfw events under the name Cell:Bind) and Heist
  • That JP party twitter hub above!
  • Sidelined for being too competitive to get in for my vibe: SANCTUM, GHOSTCLUB, so --
    --watch the Twitch stream I found that GHOSTCLUB goes live on, announced via Twitter
  • Need to watch this JP minidoc about GHOSTCLUB
  • Deciding whether I would consider any in particular a “home” like others seem to? If that’s me, where?
  • Attending a pop-up event for a venue that I’ve been to the not pop-up side of already to compare it to!
  • Some friends said DJs here can make sets more exploratory since it’s not a big main event?
  • Digging a little more into that public Club Orion venue world’s “VRSL kit” for stage lighting (e.g. as a set’s playing), esp. seeing them as staff on MusicVket4's rave world credits + their shared talk at Furality Sylva! 🔍
  • Checking out more of the groups from the Dancers of VRChat video above: VRDancing (primarily exercise), VR Dance Academy (primarily lessons), Club Poseidon (primarily their dance teams here, distinguishing "performance" and "go-go" as a matter of focused choreo v. focused stamina for e.g. music videos v. staffing DJ events, respectively), Calibrate (a talent agency for VR dancers' opportunities), Club Zodiac (balancing exotic dance and a SFW-18+ ruleset), VR Pole Dancing (fitness and some surprisingly insightful tech-specifics that VR brings with it -- like how naturally people can find interest in how cool it looks to spin like that in VRChat, to how for example a pole's reflection can mess up tracking).
  • Definitely hoped to try and make it out to more clubs when I wrote that "newer past journeys" section, ghgghghhgbh
  • Wonder if the VRCPartyHub channel list image needs an update these days
  • I really need to start in on @vrc_mce_bot and JP clubs but timezones aaaa

Section Credits

Credit for this section to: the Discord community around Straszfilms’ channel. The biggest takeaway I have thanks to their community: don’t lose heart if a first event’s vibe fails to click with you. Keep trying what I’m  available to join as the feel can vary both within a club (e.g. weekend vs. weekday event) – and all the more between clubs!

Events

Icon of a calendar.

Hubs

Past Journeys

An image from one of the MusicVket4 world.
  • Summer Vket 2022 + Metafes 2022 (Vket Photo Album) -- creators submit to join it, like a CES x Comiket! Below is a user explaining Vket 2022S.
    -- Types of Vket expos over the year: two big primary ones, then the smaller and more focused music, manga, and game exhibitions
    -- The corporate sponsor "Parareal" worlds go away when a Vket ends (licensing?), I've seen otaku anime/game/vtuber partnerships, but also gyms, banks, Coca-Cola's... can often feature in-booth interactions, e.g. a race or bowling alley at the Belc area.
    -- But the community-booth worlds stay up, and there's a fantastic fan-archived hub for them!
    -- Also much love to the futurist concept art showcases as showcase the abilities of highly talented illustrators!
  • HorrorConVR 2022 (Twitter) - A bite-sized version of the VRCon booth world catered to the genre, neato. Small enough that a good couple people are actually able to just hang out by the booths they submitted too!
Picture of the HorrorConVR event world in VRChat, most oddly with a surreal looming giant Dashcon ball pit on the ceiling above all the booths.
Picture of the VRChat world for the Virtual Okinawa event's front gate adorned with posters and iconography for the event.

Future Journeys

  • Need to add ComicVket3 to the above, went there in March 2023! Just GameVket remaining, but I'd also like to visit the Project Mokuri meetup and Lhun's Club Emission venue sometime, among keeping up with other things they try to do as Vket's small but passionate Global Team via the Discord!
  • Need to add Furality Sylva, which I attended in June 2023 as my first foray into learning about the furry community beyond my anthro friends! \o/
  • I think via Explore VRChat that I've stumbled into a Chinese community expo here?
  • Need to investigate more of the above hubs!

Section Credits

Thanks to all involved in organizing these events -- and everyone in attendance who warrants them continuing! Special thanks to "T" for helping point me towards the fan archive and letting me join their Vket field trips + another "T" for sharing about Furality!

Lessons

Icon of two conversation bubbles like in a comic book, but blank, on top of one another in discussion.

Hubs

Due to its broad nature, I've generally found resources in this area through the Sharing page's Hubs section.

Past Journeys

Language Learning Exchanges and Cultural Communities

My initial personal goal here actually isn't in pursuit of fluency -- because like I think many do I've fallen in and out of learning languages enough to appreciate the effort that takes. Instead, I see it more as knowing enough to get by, or what I've seen dubbed "travel fluent" (e.g. here, with the current open problem being to decide what "enough to get by" looks like in VRChat to focus my personal study).

  • Sign Language: having run into its discussions and users before I'd even joined VRChat, most people I've grown to respect pointed me towards fingerspelling. After I got a rough couple passes down in Bob64's "Experimental Sign Language World" I've been able to practice drills through the alphabet pretty much at any time in or out of VR that I happen to remember to work on it! I feel the need to highlight that from what I can tell this isn't really the bulk of learning sign language. In fact, there's likely a pitfall of fingerspelling becoming a crutch when you haven't built up a vocabulary of signs. (Similar to the pitfall of conflating sign language and English grammar.) Just worth bearing in mind relative to my circumstances and goals: I want to own my limits with self-awareness and respect to those who take the time to correct me. In a sense, that in itself is how you gain a chance to learn!

Science Learning Exchanges

  • StemVR – STEM oriented events, see linked blog post for full anecdotes

Physically Challenging Activities

  • Weekly, 100% informal "squat night" initiative started simply by a friend sending out invites, evolving into a Group!
  • Community workouts rotating e.g. Just Dance, Zumba Sulu, Fitness Marshall, Richard Simmons, TML Crew, song choreo
  • Dedicated workout community groups that tend to offer workouts for a variety of times and timezones, e.g.
  • VR Fitness & Biking (no paywall, supported by Patreon donation, publicly streams their workouts)
  • The Mighty Gym (paywalled to fund fancy worlds)
  • Workouts within broader community groups, e.g. VRDancing's workout meetups among their other classes
  • VRDanceAcademy -- just the intro to ballroom dances and their free yoga class so far!

Future Journeys

Language Learning Exchanges and Cultural Communities

  • Helping Hands
  • Events and Classes -- find the nerve to actually attend some (or shadow a friend who goes?)
  • Bob64's "Experimental Sign Language World" -- beyond fingerspelling toward my travel-fluent goal
  • "toki pona" (world, videos by gregdan3, videos by fuopy! preview of classroom WIP here!)
  • I've seen passing mention of KR-EN and CN-EN exchanges... but no Discords observed yet!
  • VRC EN-JP Language Exchange (creator's Twitter here, has link to the Discord, world here) -- notable for the self-assigned badge system they use to help group newcomers and expert-level speakers before giving them a loose topic to discuss or whatever the conversation naturally swings toward.

An important clarification/disclaimer: while advances afforded by the tech (e.g. motion capture playback in full 3D for sign language) are incredible for learning, self-study can't teach you everything.

  • Realizing Helping Hands also hold classes sharing more about Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing culture was probably one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had that helped motivate me to try and pull this "lessons" side of VRChat into its own section on Knomad here! 👍
  • Ultimately I see it as a combination of respect for the group/material you're interacting with + clear goals on your side in doing so, whatever they may be. I've seen people who like the circle of friends that can result, others who seek to use what they've learned outside VRChat in practical ways, and sometimes for nerds like me it's just a general love of learning.

Science Learning Exchanges

  • VRC Science Assembly: had my first surprise encounter through their SummerVket2022 exhibit, where a quiz on how to construct different magic circle shapes introduced concepts in geometry. 🤯 Only to then have more coincidental run-ins with one of their English-speaking staff in both a StemVR community and an Ancients of VRC and almost knomad-y context -- it's a small world, sometimes!

Physically Challenging Activities

‍

Section Credits

So, yes, in a nutshell I'm attempting to have this page collect a side of VRChat that's complicated to qualify. I feel like world/avatar creation warrants its own page -- though I think the world "Etiquette... " by Juice linked on that page really excels at this page's focus, but calling that out down here's probably enough. 🙃 Similarly, I don't think sticking the groups on this page under the more general page for groups and communities does justice to the unique capacity VRChat affords for learning.


… and "VRC-Unique Interactive Lessons" didn't quite fit on the homepage's button layout all that nicely. 💦

Roleplays

Icon of a masquerade mask.

Hubs

Originally, knowing as little as I did at the time of writing and still do, this wiki subcategory probably still represents the biggest "hub" that's given me a relatively broader view of VRChat's roleplay communities. However, I was since shown this interesting hub world in Dec 2022:

https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_346ed6df-5d37-42ad-bde9-ab090190135f

Past Journeys

Good Stuff

  • Getting to attend an "Intro to Roleplay" panel by the managers/veterans of several larger roleplay groups, at least in the western VRChat community.
  • Hosts: Satchi (Purple Lotus), Luna Kasai (Cafe la Aqua + Black Ram Pirates), Meathamski (Meat Rack), Artleck (Dark Ether + Nepi's Wonderland)
  • Had the most insight into the appeal and tips for beginners I've heard yet!
  • Led to a portal world I'll place in future journeys!
  • A one-off conversation with a friend who'd been to Purple Lotus, describing the appeal of roleplay to them as engaging with VRChat's worlds and the people in them with a fresh spin. I understood what he said as being "part of" a world rather than just "using" a world. For example, your community might meet up at a campfire world to hang out normally -- but roleplayers would actually be campers at that campfire. It's going beyond the surface-level in a way I find interesting, on top of just general opportunities to express yourself creatively that I personally don't necessarily think necessitates a roleplay character to achieve in VRChat.
  • This primer which I think is a nice, succinct explanation from someone without any idea what the title of this page even refers to in the first place:

Messy Stuff

  • Wandering in on a vaguely titled and described event that turned out to be a single individual in-character as a magician while establishing absolutely no ground rules or prior explanation that they were doing so... not really a grand impression, as much as I respect the self-confidence to do something like that by oneself.
  • Viewing a stream of a military-simulating community, which while the world was very impressive, behaved with such austerity and strictness that I felt honestly a bit uncomfortable as a spectator. Having some personal family history mixed in with the armed services, I appreciated them acknowledging that what they teach isn't applicable to real life, that they keep it to online and to VRChat very consciously. They were transparent about past drama and efforts to reform by removing problematic past staff, too. But just, yeah, a lot to process. Entirely nice interactions with them and the other milsim group or two I encountered outside their event as individuals though, so I wouldn't want to write them off in a negative light personally either. My favorite part was hearing them talk about how they have people from all over VRChat and at all levels of ability, playing games or watching videos together each week... working through life's ups and downs under a shared interest they clearly care a lot about.

So really still none so far that clicked with me to the degree that interested me in that panel talk! - Please reach out if you happen to know anything about this scene you'd be interested in sharing with me.

Future Journeys

  • Investigate that portal world hub!
  • Right now, it's looking like Purple Lotus will probably be the best starting point?
  • In hindsight adopting an added layer of a "character" that I'm comfortable with has kept me from feeling compelled to do it sooner rather than later.
  • I bring that up because I've had a discussion with a friend who suggested seeing it instead as the shift from "passing through a world" (e.g. say a campfire hangout for a meetup event) to "grounding yourself in that world" (so you're less detached, actually there as a camper for whatever motives the roleplay might involve).
  • Possible alternative: the interactive narrative group that go by "VRTravelers" focusing on lore-ridden tours of particular worlds they've staffed with a select few guides (sounds a lot like tabletop DMs). Being in the world with you, these lore tour guides can then actually adapt the evolving story based on the actions of your group!
  • For personal reasons, I'm having to generally keep roleplays themed around a military and/or police motif at arms length. Mostly just reading up on the documents, mission statements, and secondhand stories from people who have participated in or encountered them.

Section Credits

Thanks to the one or two acquaintances and friends so far that have shared their experiences with me!

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Tools

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