Being asked to write an essay about anything VR is probably one of the most exciting tasks I have been set. I love and have extensively lived in the world of VR for two years, and if there’s anything I can do, its talk about VR. This is why this actually turned out to be an incredibly challenging and complicated task.
Academic essay writing involves extensive objective and un-biased research based content. This makes writing about VR for me really tough, as I love VR and everything VR related so much, there are not many things that I don’t have some knowledge about within the field. So when it came to picking a topic to get started with, it was very easy and fun, but when it came to producing the work around it, it soon became very challenging and interesting none the less.
I knew straight away that I wanted to write about the Proteus effect, a phenomena where users of virtual environments are affected by using virtual avatars that represent their body, and how the change of this avatar can impact the user.
Experiencing VR in another body is something very important to me and a topic I have a lot of experience in. Personally I have built a part of my life on the VR social platform VRChat over the past two years.
Here you can see part of my time spent in VRChat on SteamVR, which is not all of the time I have spent in the game. I have also logged many hours on the Oculus PC client of VRChat and the Quest standalone version of VRChat too. I would estimate it is now approaching 1000 hours, over the past two years. Compared to a large percentage of my friends on VRChat, averaging 500 hours a year is on the low side, I have friends that have averages of 1000 to 2000 hours a year on the platform. 500 hours for perspective, is roughly 21 continuous days of 365.
In VRChat you have an avatar to represent your body to other users on the platform, and having spent so long on the platform, it has become quite an intimate and important interaction, between myself and my digital identity. It has shown me many things about myself and helped me learn about my values and my real world identity too.
So I knew I wanted to write about the interaction between users of VR social platforms and their avatars, exploring the Proteus effect and to get some users perspectives on this area too. However, whilst doing my research for this discussion I ended up watching a VRChat YouTube documentary written by Strasz, who discusses identity and VRChat;
The video so well discussed the topics that I wanted to talk about, that I suddenly felt incapable of writing about the ideas. It was such an excellent video essay that I felt unable to write about the same subject without constantly just agreeing with everything they said, and not really having anything unique to discuss myself.
So I decided to turn to an equally important discussion, the impact of social VR on behaviour. This a relatively similar talking point, but focuses more on the social norms of virtual spaces and compares them to real life and discusses the impact this has on the users. This was the topic I eventually began writing about, and little did I know, it was too much to discuss in 1600 words.
To summarise the writing process, I am going to include the working document I drafted and revised the essay in, and then I will discuss how and why the essay ended up where it did.
Though the image has blurred quite a lot in the blog post, it still conveys the right information. I wrote out the essay starting with some rough ideas to cover with references to relevant research material. I began discussing under the title; The impact of social VR interaction on an individuals behaviour. However, I quickly reached nearly 2000 words before even discussing a single impact on peoples behaviour. I soon realised that I had written two essays, What is social VR? and The positives and negatives of VRChat, essentially. I realised that to make a coherent and well structured essay and to properly manage my time, I needed to write my essay on one or the other. At the time of making this decision, I had only written about half to two thirds of the essay discussing VRChat’s ins and outs, and the essay about Social VR almost stood on its own. So with a second and final change, I decided that the ultimate discussion I would make would be What is Social VR?
For research into this question and to provide a range of references, I use data from various websites documenting the history of VR as a technology, the history of VRChat, and a variety of YouTube documentaries discussing various users recollection and opinions about VRChat as a platform. I tried to learn from these sources about the subject matter primarily to back up my own experience and knowledge, so as to include information that could be verified from multiple sources. If I were to just write about my past in VR, then it would be a horribly subjective documentation of one persons experiences, and would lack the necessary objective framing required for such a piece of writing.
Before I had cut my full draft down, I included a number of various VR social platforms, talked extensively about each one on a technical level and about various VR hardware, companies and overall, went into far too much detail about subjects that weren’t valuable to the message of the piece. It was hard to cut down the content, but I eventually broke the essay down to the points that efficiently conveyed the discussion whilst still hitting on everything I wanted to talk about.
In the final discussion about VRChat as a social VR platform, I opened the research up to interviewing users on VRChat in-person about what they have experienced, and how they feel about the platform, as part of their lives. It was an important part to bring real peoples words into the essay, to show (even if most of them were close friends that I’ve known for a long time) what people on these platforms feel about them. It was a humbling and relieving moment to take a step back from the very analytical thought process I had been in, discussing this topic, to finally hear people talking naturally about the subject and enjoying reflecting on it.
Overall, I am really pleased with the end product, even if it was quite far from what I had originally intended to write about. The process taught me a lot about writing, about research and about critical and unbiased analysis. If I had had more words to write, I would have loved to have combined a few separate but linked ideas about behavioural impact and positives and negatives, but given the word count constrains, I like how the essay panned out.