Rec Room recently reported over 1 million monthly users and a higher peak concurrency than VRChat. But when it comes to the two leading social VR worlds, VRChat seems to have a crucial edge: A far more active and ambitious creative community.
That statement is my personal estimation, to be sure. And to be fair, Rec Room does have some interesting user-made projects. But I follow both worlds pretty closely, and VRChat’s user-driven worlds and innovations consistently seem to hit on a completely different, higher level. Just in the last few months, for example, I’ve written about*:
- A user-made program that converts C# to Udon (VRChat’s internal scripting system).
- A user-created process to juggle virtual balls from real life motion tracking.
- A group-created VRChat world that’s so popular, it’s becoming a stand-alone VR game.
There’s even an entire VRChat-based rave subculture (see below).
Why has VRChat succeeded so far on this front? A casual survey of user creators points to a core factor:
The flexibility of avatar customization. By contrast, the cartoonish, puppet-like avatars of Rec Room seem to have put off many creators. (I’m tempted to say that actually translates in real terms to, “You can be an anime girl or furry in VRChat but not Rec Room”.)
“I took one look at Rec Room and my first thought was, 'No one wants to be constrained to Miis'", as a furry named Alderem puts it, referencing the oldschool Nintendo avatars.
But creative interest in avatar flexibility isn’t limited to furries. VRChat creator Lakuza originally joined the world because he wanted to make an avatar based on a favorite childhood game character: “Not something I can do in Rec Room,” he tells me. And having did that, he went on to co-create the hit game world I mentioned above, along with many other projects, most recently co-creating a VRChat world inspired by Jet Set Radio.
“I assume it would be similar to if Rec Room was desktop only and it was competing with Second Life, as Lakuza observes. “People will always pick whatever gives them the most freedom I think.”
Adeon Writer, a longtime Second Life user now active in VRChat, cites the Argent Stonecutter Test for virtual worlds, invented by an SLer of the same name many years ago.
“When any of them were brought up, he’d simply ask ‘Can you be a ferret?’ This became more or less a meme on our virtual world forum, which had no furry focus mind you... it actually makes the perfect litmus test for content creation freedom: If you can meet such an oddball request of being a ferret, [the world’s] content creation tools are usually open enough to do anything.”
And there’s not only ferret avatars in VRChat, there’s whole YouTube channels devoted to being a ferret in VRChat.
*Rec Room fans: If there are user-driven projects of equivalent scope coming from your world that I missed, please let me know. (And for the record, I also reached out to the Rec Room development team with this question.)
Thanks to Adeon for help with VRChat interviews!
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