This week, unfortunately, was rather uneventful for this unit since our deadline for The Love Machine is looming and we have a couple of more months for this one. Nevertheless, we gave a little bit more thought into what the redirection means for our project in terms of technicality and research.

I found out that VRChat users are just as protective of VRChat interactions as its developers, but there is still an overwhelming amount of people who wanted to be able to script their own interactions in their custom worlds. In fact, it’s a feature 400+ users voted for. You can read some of the hesitations there as well. These mostly revolve around controlling abuse.

VRChat responded to this feature request and worked on their own programming language, called Udon, that can be compiled in Unity. They spent two years working on it, and perhaps luckily for us, released it about two months ago. We will be looking into how useful this new release could be for our custom world.

In terms of research, we are embracing this redirection as a way to learn not only about an existing social platform and its ethics, but also about the possibility of future role-playing games being held in virtual platforms. Social virtual platforms have proved to be a host for all sorts of activities (baptisms, yoga, meditation, business meetings, you name it), so it is not such a long-shot to imagine games being designed specifically for these umbrella platforms.

Excited to see what we can achieve within these limits we have set for ourselves.