A*RAVE: A VRChat Summer Social Review

Crowded voice calls are annoying! It’s impossible to avoid people talking over each other. There are no nonverbal cues to guide speaking order, and it’s easy for louder voices to drown out quieter ones. At a real, physical party, people tend to separate into smaller groups that they can freely float between. How can an online socializer like me recreate that vibe?

I need some kind of simulation of space, and the attenuation of sound across distance. I need some kind of visual ambience to set the mood and spark conversation. I need some kind of passive personal expression that is more robust than a Discord icon. And I need the program that provides this to be free, so I can convince 10-20 people to download it. 

I need VRChat.

I knew very little about VRChat until a few weeks ago, when I started exploring random worlds with my friend Ava to evaluate their suitability for a party and an afterparty that could transcend the limitations of voice chat during a rote multiplayer game. We made playlists, planned activities, and Ava even made a poster.

The event we hosted, A*RAVE, was mostly a success, but we experienced ups and downs that taught us lessons to make the next event better. This review of our own party will serve as a record of the strengths and weaknesses of our plans, so that perhaps you too can learn some tips about planning a virtual summer social.

Secret Spring

Secret Spring is a club-themed world with a dance floor, a large pool area, and a few private rooms. Of all the virtual clubs we evaluated, this one had what seemed like the best balance of high-energy and low-energy space. The dance floor had big screens and speakers with tons of customizable lights synced to the music, and the more secluded pool areas would spatially muffle the music to give people a break when they wanted one.

One thing I discovered while selecting the best club words is that I like listening to music in VRChat way more than listening to music in another desktop window. Even the subtlest spatial audio effects are enough to passively encourage me to maintain a mental model of a fictional space. This makes the music feel like it’s coming from giant speakers in a large room, rather than tiny speakers right next to my ear. Even when I wasn’t really paying attention to the music, its presence and its distortion was a huge buff to my ability to imagine that I was “there.”

I’m glad the music served that background function, because the rave wasn’t really as high-energy as we planned for. 3:00PM was perhaps too early to expect people to loosen up, especially with our entourage of weekend late-risers. People trickled in slowly, and sometimes had to go to a different world to pick out an avatar with dance animations. More importantly, the world was too big to force our group of ~10 people, many of whom have not met before, to stay together. My job as Host was to keep people mingling and entertained, but you can’t stop people from trying to explore the whole world at their own pace. The DJ booth did not have integrated YouTube search or playlist functionality, so Ava took on the heroic task of running back to the DJ booth to copy a YouTube link from our playlist spreadsheet every time the current song was about to end, which limited their ability to corral guests.

“I think the weakness of VRChat is that it is too tempting to make a place ‘too big’ or ‘too cool.’ It makes you appreciate how small most clubs are in real life. We’ve made preparations for future parties, but having to run back through a huge map to update the music after every song quickly lost its novelty. Future attendees should rest assured I have solved this problem in the case of DJing, but even without schlepping for music, seeing people disappear or get lost made it hard to tell when people were having fun, and seemed to frequently lead to people getting distracted from VRChat entirely.” ― Ava

When people did coalesce early in the party, it was in front of mirrors. Everybody liked seeing their own avatars and testing out animations. None of us actually had VR hardware, so our dance moves were restricted to the animations that happened to be programmed into our avatars, plus whatever flourishes we could add through jumping and crouching. For my part, getting a sense of my movement abilities in front of the mirror made me feel more embodied in my avatar throughout the night, because I could build a mental connection between my first-person view and the way that I appear to others.

It’s also just fun, as a game, to study all the “cards in your deck” and build a dance routine out of them. I continued changing avatars throughout the night just to check what their moves were, like I was trying out characters in the fighting game. Once everyone had practiced their moves enough, they did actually get out onto the dance floor. Perhaps the most impressive move of the night was from one user who summoned the Noble Phantasm of Fate’s Nero Claudius to transform the dance floor into an ancient Roman theatre.

It turns out, dancing actually does a lot to break the ice! As the music playlist concluded, the guests remained friendly enough to hunt for the 20 hidden treasures of Secret Spring. Many of them required advanced jumping techniques or enlarging and shrinking avatar size, which injected a surprisingly game-y atmosphere to our final moments there. While I think the gameplay demands of games like Lethal Company or Peak often stifles the possibility for other conversation, this temporary co-op platformer added a welcome social structure to the party.

The Secret Spring phase of the night was a success, but barely. In the future, I would definitely set a later starting time, begin the night in an avatar-select world to make sure everyone has the avatars they want, and choose a club world that is small enough to keep everyone nearby.

Score: ★★★☆☆

Tip Touchers Custom Truth or Dare

Tip Touchers Truth or Dare is gray and empty and ugly. There’s nothing to look at, no ambience to set the mood. Ava and I knew this was a problem, but we proceeded with it anyway because it was the only world we could find with custom-input truth or dare. We wrote some fun ones, but the randomizer algorithm led to frequent repeats. And ultimately, they weren’t fun enough to overcome the depressing atmosphere. Even worse, our too-early start time struck again. People were getting hungry for dinner while we were here, and so our party population dwindled to as low as 5 people.

It wasn’t all bad. The people who remained did share some big laughs to dares such as “What if The Joker could beatbox?”; “Make a villainous speech.”; and “Sing the chorus of Linkin Park’s ‘In The End.’” But this world was definitely the low point of the night, and I wouldn’t go back to it in the future.

Score: ★★☆☆☆

Club Dionysus

Club Dionysus was one of the earliest club worlds that Ava and I explored, and we rejected it both because it was way too big and had no spatial audio muffling. But it did have a first-person platforming course that could potentially reinject some of the energy from Secret Spring; and a preconfigured truth or dare firepit that we could fall back on once the Tip Touchers randomizer started repeating too often.

I was desperate to rescue the party, so I suggested we go here. The platforming course definitely got the blood pumping a bit, but all of our guests were so good at platforming that it only lasted a few minutes. Thankfully, it was enough to warm people up for the truth or dare firepit, which is where the vibe was truly saved.

“I found myself using VRChat’s tools to imitate what I would do at an IRL party: sit on tables or countertops with my legs crossed. It was simply a matter of changing my animation, but I still found it validating to convey my sense of style in a way that was impossible on Discord. I felt cool.” ― Ava

This is where I really internalized the most important lesson of the night: you have to keep people in a small space, and you have to give them some nice scenery. If you do that, people will make the conversation happen without much prodding. Ava and I wrote softball truths and dares because we knew a lot of guests would be strangers to each other, but the Club Dionysus prompts were more personal and raunchy. This world is, after all, a now-defunct 18+ club with lots of framed photos of sexy regulars on the walls. Our guests responded well to the spice, and it ended up sparking long conversational tangents that went way beyond the initial prompt.

Around this time, the sun was actually setting on the east coast. New guests trickled in as they were getting off work, and old guests returned from dinner. Everyone naturally gravitated towards the firepit, and organically integrated themselves into the group conversation. Some people paired off to explore, but they always returned to the firepit. No music was playing, and I barely noticed. After a mixed beginning, A*RAVE seemed to be really taking off.

Score: ★★★★☆

House Party Basement

“I had a lot of fun building up ‘the basement.’ It was one of my earliest favorites since Crystal and I found it and threw Dr. Katz on the TV. But one of its greatest strengths was how its groundedness made it fun to give it mystique, it’s one of the only ways I consistently roleplayed throughout the night. ‘We’ll head to the basement soon.’ ‘My uncle says we can chill in his basement tonight.’ ‘We got markers in the basement.’ By being a believable space, it was fun to assign it emotional characteristics in a way that didn’t feel right with a sexy, future nightclub that couldn’t exist in real life.” ― Ava

House Party Basement was easily the slam dunk of the night.

Learning my lesson from Secret Spring and Tip Touchers, I noticed when people started getting tired of Club Dionysus scenery, and transitioned everyone to mine and Ava’s pre-selected afterparty space. It was the perfect place to continue the casual conversation that had been brewing in Club Dionysus.

This world was also one of the first ones that Ava and I explored, and we always knew it would be good, but I didn’t appreciate just how good it was until we filled it with ~15 people. Every other world we explored would connect every video screen to the same input, but the opposite ends of House Party Basement had two separate video screens with independent inputs and their own spatial audio. The pool table in the middle of the basement acted as a third social locus that could hear muffled audio from both video screens. Then, there was just enough room between these three loci for two or three people to gather.

I couldn’t design a better world for our group size. It’s just small enough that nobody can lose track of each other, and just big enough to allow separate spheres of conversation, and just open-ended enough that people always feel invited to jump into a different sphere. The most active socializing of the night happened in the House Party Basement, and I didn’t have to do any work to keep it going. 

In fact, the vibe was so much like a real house party that I did the same thing I like to do in real life: find my own little spot (on the couch, under the pool table, or on the pool table) and just listen to the pleasant sounds of other peoples’ conversation. Much like playing with my deck of dancing animations in Secret Spring, I became very practiced at the skill of Pretending to Sit Down by carefully hovering my avatar at just the right height in just the right pose. Digital aura farming can be its own game too.

“Easily the highlight of my evening was hiding under that pool table. Me and Crystal were lying prone beneath it and inviting the nearby partygoers to chat with us. It was our impromptu fort. All around us I could hear other people’s conversations, I could hear someone playing the basement’s arcade machine, and chill techno was pulsing the entire time. The space enabled the sensation of not just talking, but being visited. People had to come find us, and find us they did. The added effort of finding the party’s “chill corner” made the socialization happening there feel genuine and intimate.” ― Ava

We were here well past midnight, a fact that caught me by surprise as I had barely noticed the physical effects of playing a video game for 8 hours straight. As guests said their goodbyes, the few people remaining gathered into the cramped, sparsely decorated bathroom of this basement. This is the closest the night came to just being a Discord call. Everyone could hear everyone else, and there was no way to smoothly separate. What remained of VRChat’s social benefits was the expressiveness of our avatars, and the unique bond that lives between the last few lingerers of a long party.

We probably could have gone another hour in that bathroom, but it’s better to end strong than let the vibe awkwardly fizzle. I was and still am very very happy with House Party Basement, and wholeheartedly recommend it to any groups of 10-20 people.

Score: ★★★★★

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Total score for A*RAVE? 14/20. That’s a 4/5 if you round up. An acceptable result for Crystal and Ava’s first attempt, especially since it got better as it went on. This party began as a dilettante’s experiment, but now I’m a true believer in the social possibilities of VRChat, and I converted some of my guests as well. I’m not interested in the metaverse as a replacement to the web or a place to conduct business, but the sense of presence and intimacy does make for a surprisingly effective 3D chatroom.

Don’t let me buy a VR headset.