What does 5300 Hours of VRChat do?
Nov 5, 2025
VRChat is an online social platform that is most commonly navigated entirely through VR. Users create worlds and avatars, and other users can join those worlds and appear as those avatars. The game has enjoyed moderate popularity for several years, fostering many different cultures. Worlds can be for just hanging out, or contain games. Users backgrounds vary wildy, in terms of anything from age to ethnicity. This can be attributed to the Meta Quest 2's large success (and very cheap price) in the time period around and after the covid pandemic.
I spent my late high school years on VRChat. Most of my hours were accumulated in just a couple years, and most of my close relationships in my life have developed there. VRChat was the first place I formed romantic and close relationships. This normally results in catastrophe, but I'm pretty sure I can be considered a "well-adjusted" person. These two facts seem to contradict, and I wanted to look into it more. In my freshman year of college, I wrote an essay as my final paper, corroborating a good variety of sources to find my answer.
tl:dr, There are two main reasons.
First, while I was spending most of my time online, I was also spending time with my in-person friend groups through school, boy scouts, etc. This allowed me to maintain the ability to switch between group identities. It's not that I went too far down the hole, it's more that I carefully belayed down, making frequent trips back up to make sure I didn't go insane.
Second, I didn't take the easy route in terms of group attraction, as many do in the furry community. I always tended towards my true personality, leading to learning skills online that transferred well into in-person. This was greatly aided by the VR environment. The skills that VR social environments reward are much closer to the skills that in-person environments learn, at least compared to a typical online platform.
Some parts of my life are still affected -- I'm far more likely to be embarassed by something in-person than not, even in similar groups. But overall, I've gotten off pretty easy.
Below is the essay, lightly edited, which focuses on the broader question of online communities. In another post, I'll go into the risks involved with getting involved in the VRChat furry community.
Affective Mechanisms of Online Communities on Social Development:
“Hey, wanna play again tomorrow?”
The popularization of the internet was a tremendous and irreversible global shift that changed the way humans communicate. This is the first time in history we can transfer high volumes of information nearly instantaneously. With it, we have seen something new: a non-negligible portion of one’s development comes from the ways one interacts with people on the internet. Most of these interactions take place in online communities, places on the internet that aim to emulate a physical community. General perception of online communities is poor and there are valid reasons to be weary of them, but these concerns have depth to them. I wish to restructure how online communities are viewed, to properly describe the reasons for participation in virtual communities, and to describe the effect these communities have on social development.
A Framework to Discuss Virtual Communities
The present popular definitions of virtual communities are outdated. In this 2002 definition from Catherine Ridings, a Business Information Systems specialist, virtual communities are “groups of people with common interests and practices that communicate regularly and for some duration in an organized way over the Internet through a common location or mechanism.” Since the early age of the internet, a couple of crucial variables have shifted, that being, the amount of people that use the internet, and the number of ways to interact on the internet. Even small communities have thousands of members and span across multiple platforms. To get to a better definition, we should return to the basis of an in-person community, and look at how current users define their participation in the internet.
A community can be defined as “a group or network of persons who are [objectively] connected to each other by relatively durable social relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties and who mutually [and subjectively] define that relationship as important to their social identity and social practice.” This definition comes from an article headed by Paul James, who is the Director of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. It’s useful as it highlights some important components, specifically the requirement of mutual inclusion, and the requirement of “relatively durable social relations”.
To go against Ridings’ definition, there are many types of “locations” and mechanisms that exist online; far more different types than can exist in person. To broadly categorize the most common ways youth interact with the internet, we see multiplayer online video games, social media platforms, and social platforms. The distinguishing feature between a social media platform and a social platform is that a social platform aims to provide users with connections to other users, and a social media platform aims to provide users with content. Connections are two-way, content is one-way. This includes platforms like Instagram and Reddit, which both provide features to interact with users, but it is far a secondary purpose to the delivery of media. A near-exception is Twitter, a platform that emphasizes interaction between users through replies, reposts, and quotes, which makes it seem like a social platform. This platform has also gained a reputation of being extremely toxic. An important point in the distinction of platforms is whether a platform has an “algorithm” that feeds users with content. This manipulation it brings is outside the realm of feasible discussion. For this reason, I’ll largely disregard social media platforms from discussion.
A community may exist across multiple of these types of platforms, in what can be called online spaces. For instance, the Valorant community manifests in the game itself through voice chat and in-game communication, where users tend to communicate very specifically about the game, which means these spaces are task-oriented. Something notable is that, without explicit effort from a user, they will be placed with strangers nearly every time, making these interactions very anonymous. Continuing with the example of Valorant, there also exist large groups on social platforms like Discord where Valorant players interact, though interestingly, these interactions are less likely to be about the game and often diverge into general discussion. As opposed to being task-oriented, these interactions are general. As a member of many online spaces, Jung Chow has noted in an in-person interview, these places that are outside the systems of the game, but are still a part of the community, are most commonly where friendships are formed. While retaining certain aspects of anonymity, these repeated interactions tend to be personal, losing some aspects of anonymity while maintaining some specifics such as visual or auditory anonymity.
The comparison of these two spaces brings out a classification system of online spaces as a function of the degrees of anonymity, and the degree of task orientation. In a more task-oriented space, interaction topics are prescribed by the designers of the space. The ways that designers socially engineer their players are complicated and can end up with unusual results, which can be seen in games like League of Legends or Valorant, where in-game behavior is highly task-oriented, leading to toxicity and general deviations from typical social behavior. To avoid these complications, I’d prefer to look at spaces that are not task-oriented, such as social platforms. Now that the true target of our questions has been reached, we can go further into the forces that drive people to these spaces, as well as the forces people experience within these spaces.
Why not Touch some Grass?
Participation in these communities relies on two things: acquisition and retention. To provide some fundamental information on these topics, we have the paper by Ridings that was previously mentioned. Note that this paper was targeted towards communities occupied by mainly adults. She broke down the reasons for participation in these communities into the following categories: Information exchange, social support, friendship, and recreation. These are fairly self-explanatory except for the two similar terms, social support and friendship.
J. S. House, an author quoted by Ridings, provides a distinction: Friendship “is about the value of being together [while] social support… deals with seeking emotional help or helping others…” with “...a flow of emotional concern, instrumental aid, information, and/or appraisal (information relevant to self-evaluation) between people.” To draw on conventional definitions, friendship involves repeated interactions with an individual, while social support is not under this restriction. In some cases there is overlap, but there are some special cases both in-person and online.
In our day-to-day lives, the people that can offer social support are often called one’s support structure or support group, and nearly exclusively consist of friends and people one knows. Interestingly, on the Internet, social support can come from total strangers, but with apparently just as good of a result, as social support is the second most popular reason for participation in online communities, only behind information exchange. The question is, of course, why not just use your in-person support group? In almost every case, one does have resources available to them in person, whether it be family, friends, teachers, or resources provided by educational institutes. Using the Internet as part of one’s support structure, or to make friends, is a choice. To find the reason for this choice, we can look at social identity theory.
It is a common saying that we are influenced by either “nature” or “nurture”, with nature being the unchanging essence of who we are, and nurture being the environment we exist in. Social psychology looks specifically at the nurture component and states that one’s environment is a critical factor in their behavior. A central area of social psychology is social influence, or how people affect people. Within that, the primary way people affect people is through conformity, which influences someone’s social identity to align with another person or group’s identity. Conformity is the main driving force of social influence, as the trust and belongingness it creates is what has enabled our society to exist. Conformity is important, and this is confirmed by our evolution, where being socially outcast functions similarly to starvation (Cacioppo 5). The more you can conform to a group, the more you will be comfortable in that group.
To look at how people can conform, we can look at mechanisms of group attraction, and specifically how they vary in-person and online. The difference is of course varying levels of anonymity. We see these conditions isolated in a study done by Spears, where conversations were either completely anonymous with only text-based communication or supplemented with two-way real-time silent video. It was found that the visual anonymity of text-only communication led to higher group attraction, or higher conformity. This is a contrasting result to many studies that attempted to study the same question, though did so in person, and anonymity was achieved through the use of masks and overalls, which is not ideal for our question of online interaction. These outdated studies have led to the conclusion that more anonymity leads to more disinhibited and hostile behavior. However in Spears’ study, where computer-mediated communication was used, a more applicable and positive result was found. According to a newer model of sociology discussed in Spears’ paper, this result is caused by a “shift of self-focus from personal to group-based aspects of the self (rather than a reduction in self-awareness)” Furthermore, self-categorization increased the tendency to perceive others in terms of their similarity to the prototypical group member.” Effectively, visual anonymity increases a person’s tendency to conform, and their tendency to evaluate others’ ability to conform. Therefore, anonymity increases conformity, which then increases comfort, which makes the internet an easier place to go for someone looking for social support.
Applications
The controlled environments of studies are a great place to lay out principles, but the environment of the Internet is ever-changing, so exact applications of these principles do not last so long. Nevertheless, some specific applications of these principles will be applied to the current internet to answer our question of how the Internet’s current systems affect social development.
Most people, even those outside of online spaces, have a couple of stereotypes about people who participate in online spaces. One of the most socially ubiquitous, even among older generations, is the “gamer” stereotype where someone obsesses over video games, ignoring anything that isn’t gaming. As stated before, the mechanisms of task-oriented groups are outside our scope. Furthermore, this stereotype is far less salient than the current prevailing stereotype among youth, the “chronically online” individual.
As defined by Jonathan Ruffing in an interview over Discord who lightly participates in online communities, someone “chronically online” is “so attached to [an online] community that [they] can’t possibly identify with anything else.” For instance, one may spend a lot of time communicating on a Discord server about a video game. This leads someone to conform to that group identity, which is a very small cultural sphere. The internet has its own “rules” of communication, and Discord further specifies by having its conventions and patterns, and then existing in a specific game community now adds more rules and conventions, none of which align with the rules of broader society. The group identity of this community is therefore very far removed from the real world. Conforming too strongly to this group identity can have undesired effects when trying to interact in the real world, where the rules can be different, and it can be harder to conform. Since conforming in a less anonymous space is more difficult, chronically online people avoid the difficulty by remaining strongly identified with their group identity of choice and bringing it into the real world, where it usually doesn’t belong. This is decidedly not good, but is a tough problem to solve. We see the Internet acting as a very effective failsafe for people who do not feel comfortable in their present circumstances, but we also sometimes see it as a crutch that causes individuals to maladaptively develop.
People already occupy many social spaces in their lives, including work, school, and personal life. We can effectively switch between these social contexts and align ourselves at least partially with many group identities each day. There is no inherent reason why the group identity of an online community should be excluded from this. Through incorporating online group identities into your social identity repertoire, it is possible to harmlessly engage in both, even for large amounts of time, with no detriment to an individual’s ability to fit in with broader society. It is when someone actively closes themselves off from the outside world that they begin to lose touch and forget how to align with their day-to-day group identities. As stated earlier, anyone can be part of a community as long as they deem it important to them. The only barrier is others’ acceptance, which can be gained through conforming, which for the average reader is not a difficult feat and is by and large the default behavior among us.
A topic not addressed in much of this research and therefore much of this paper was developmental disorders like autism, Asperger's, and even ADHD, which all inhibit one’s ability to conform to social norms. This of course pushes individuals away from society, but in many cases with nowhere to go. Due to the tendency of anonymous groups to evaluate members more based on their similarity to typical group members, online communities are typically accepting of these people and so certain online communities attract individuals that are partially unable to fully conform to social norms. From data from a research project based out of Duquesne University, in the cases of certain online communities, notably the furry community, this effect is very noticeable with autism rates in the furry community being upwards of quadruple that of the general population. Something to note is that this is not to say societal norms are evil and purposely attempt to push away neurodivergent people and that online communities have been created specifically as safe havens for outcasts, it’s just the natural consequence of the differences in group behavior caused by anonymous interactions.
Now that we know the causes and effects of typical online communities, a more exotic form of community that I have a particular interest in can be looked at. Social VR is one of the more recent developments in computer-mediated communication, and, when looked at from a social perspective, is as close to in-person interaction as possible. Even with present technology, some of the most difficult-to-attain facets of in-person communication have been transferred, including body language, eye contact, speech, facial expressions, and very importantly, presence. And body language is a huge one, look at how poorly video conferencing like Zoom does. The only form aspect of one’s identity that is kept secret in VR is the visual aspect. This makes social VRthe perfect testing ground for future research surrounding visual anonymity, and also just an interesting thing to experience for yourself. The factors contributing to VR computer-mediated communication are complex and the technology enabling this is very new, but in the future, more research can hopefully be done.
The Internet was something we did not evolve for, and contrary to most of history, evolves far faster than us. From this we have witnessed the degree of control the Internet has been able to gain over us in all areas especially socially. Anonymity, once only achieved through masks and costumes, now is a luxury provided to nearly everyone on Earth. The Internet is merely another facet of social expression, a tool for us to use and analyze. Online communities have been able to provide social benefits to people who would’ve struggled otherwise. They have the ability to give anyone the comfort of being able to identify with whatever group identity they want, even past what in-person communities could offer. As with all tools, it is capable of being used and misused. It is, most simply, an extra option for people to communicate, and has overall brought many people together in ways they never would have been connected previously.
Works Cited
Catherine M. Ridings, David Gefen, Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang out Online, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 10, Issue 1, 1 November 2004, JCMC10110, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2004.tb00229.
Cacioppo, John T et al. “Evolutionary mechanisms for loneliness.” Cognition & emotion vol. 28,1 (2014): 3-21. doi:10.1080/02699931.2013.837379
Chow, Jung. Personal interview. 1 May 2024. Fein, Elizabeth. “Autism in the Fandom: Opportunities, Barriers & Recommendations.”
Furscience, 15 Jan. 2024, furscience.com/autism-in-the-fandom/. James, Paul; Nadarajah, Yaso; Haive, Karen; Stead, Victoria (2012). Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development: Other Paths for Papua New Guinea. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press. p. 14. Lea, M., Spears, R., & de Groot, D. (2001). Knowing Me, Knowing You: Anonymity Effects on Social Identity Processes within Groups. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(5), 526-537. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167201275002
Mahdi, Yousif. “Social Identity: Impact on Attitudes, Behaviors and Beliefs.” Sociology and Criminology-Open Access, Longdom Publishing, 2023, www.longdom.org/open-access/social-identity-impact-on-attitudes-behaviors-and-beliefs-98382.html.
Ruffing, Jon. Discord interview. 5 May 2024.