Including Excerpts from a longer text by the author

First Person: Orientation as Everything

Immersive virtual reality is a first-person medium. If you are accustomed to your own body, with full access to your eyes and ears, the first time you try it, you’ll hear the room shift, you’ll see your perspective change. This is especially true if you try on an avatar that is much larger or smaller than you are in real life. I want to say you’ll see the entire world change scale when you do this, but actually, no, the world doesn’t seem to change, it is just different.

Once you were sitting at a table with a coffee cup in front of you, now you are leaning on a giant coffee cup, looking off the cliff-edge of a table. This shift, this view out of your sensorium, is not as it was before, but you don’t necessarily feel smaller or larger. The shift in scale only hits when you look at your friends, and the more intimate the relationship, the better you know their body and their stance, the more you know how their eyes level with yours, the more jarring the sensation. Strangers are merely giants, sometimes malicious but often ignorant, taking steps without noticing you. Friends are accidental giants, and you find yourself wanting to gain their attention, wanting their protection or awareness. Conversely, if it is you that is now giant you might find yourself standing very still indeed, until you have located all that you care about and ensured yourself you won’t hurt them.

Aware you are now eye-level with your friend’s toe, you have a choice: the disorientation is real, but it’s yours or it isn’t. If this is confusing or upsetting, you will likely leave. If it is delightful, intriguing, then you will stay, exploring until you find a virtual body that feels like you have always lived in it, and you will move through this life in this form just to see what it means to do that. VR confronts you with your body, and the idea that your body can be a choice. For some this is empowering beyond words, but for others, it’s a mistake. I have spoken to people who feel at odds with their real-life body and find such experiences incredibly affirming, but this experiment in body choice is significant in a way that exceeds our current ability to cope.

You are sitting at a virtual kitchen table, among your chosen family, in a body you have selected. You find yourself eye-level with your friend’s foot, and this is delightful or scary, or both. You might try and find the button that puts you in third-person view – usually a more comfortable method of occupying and navigating a body that isn’t yet yours. From this perspective, you can see your character, operating it as you would a puppet, your agency proxied through a mask you can observe. But immersive VR has no third-person mode. You can only see your hands, or your hand-proxies – paws, or tentacles or cubes on sticks – in front of you. You need a mirror, a frame of reference to provide some boundaries and context.

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Since we first began this vast awkward experiment of living networked lives online, we’ve been saying this: online identity lets you explore, lets you try things out, allows you to see things from a different perspective. Sociologist Erving Goffman spelled out this context-shifting nature of social interaction in the 1960s, decades before there was an “online” to be had. From the very beginning, we have context-switched, code-switched, and masked our way through complex social environments, for reasons ranging from convenience to panicked survival. So we know this, we live this, but the digital version of this narrative has remained relentlessly, exhaustingly default – which is to say mostly cis-male and straight; barely approaching the mind-exploding diversity and intersectionality of race, language, gender, all the bodies, shapes, and identities we can see around us.

Virtual worlds lean hard in the other direction, embracing the idea that identity is fluid, constructed and bricolaged from the exhaust of dominant realities. Virtual realities assert that fandom – cringy, offputting, full of shibboleths – are a legitimate way to live. They propose that lives can be well-wasted, that language choice matters, and is fluid, and that identity belongs to you. While the future might have shattered into a thousand pieces, each of these is a tiny queer universe unto to itself, glittering and boundless.

Mounting Evidence

Immersive VR is notoriously difficult to visually represent. There are technical issues – the headsets we wear are designed to track head movements in close to real-time. Any visual feed tracking the user’s viewpoint jitters around the edges, bouncing rapidly from face to object to background to object. This fails to adequately document the experience of being in VR, simply following the actions of whoever’s wearing the headset. This footage shows which elements of a world catch the user’s attention, and in what order, but does little to convey what it means – or feels like – to occupy the world they’re experiencing first-hand.

Compounding this is the fact that there are no accidents in a virtual environment. In the physical world, framing and choreography are the purview of the artist, subject to the whims of the environment and its occupants. An architect may have intended their building to look a certain way, but their control terminates at the property line. They have no influence over the design of neighbouring structures, the history of the road cutting through the plaza, the war that split the guts of their building wide open. They cannot stop the tenants from draping their laundry, the writers tagging the walls with graffiti, the pollution tinting the facade, or the rats and birds that take up residence within. In real life, the contingency of these interlocking factors makes framing and photographing a given scene a gesture that recognises that even architecture, often figured as permanent, is an event – a falling-apart across multiple timescales, experienced all at once.

If a virtual building is covered in graffiti or a piece of trash blows past, it is because the author of the world made that choice. Nothing is left to chance. Straying from the path reveals the trick: the buildings are hollow, the lights are painted, the villages are all Potemkin.

Janet Murray offers a revised take on Samuel Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief, arguing that a better model for digital media is the active creation of belief.

When fans are able to explore the world, to ask questions of it, and discover new and consistent facts about it, then their belief increases as a result of their actions and they experience the active creation of belief. Janet Murray

This rings true, but by the same contract, audience members must agree to the bounds of the play established by the world’s creator: they must stay on the intended path and frame their actions within the magic circle. The less clear this is, the more the illusion blurs, the less satisfying and more disconcerting the experience.

Immersive virtual reality requires this active creation of belief: VR spaces only really work when you relinquish the role of the observer, and step into the ring.

Queer Futures

Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial
We're just...
You could be me and I could be you
Always the same and never the same
Day by day, life after life
Without my legs or my hair
Without my genes or my blood
With no name and with no type of story
Where do I live?
Tell me, where do I exist?”
Sophie, Immaterial

[Step into] communities of care and innovation: each quietly building out and maintaining their own universes for their own people, without feeling the need to plug these into a mythological public the size of the entire globe. These networks, identified as weak-ties at global scale, are in fact strong-ties at local scale, potentially constituting networks of resilience stronger than their visible nodes suggest.

I’m particularly heartened at the overlap between the retro-tech communities, folks who find and restore and archive “lost” technical knowledge and evolutionary “dead ends”, and queer communities of mutual aid. There’s something about understanding and caring for artifacts that belong to a different time which feels less like nostalgia than a duty of care. You can see this among those sourcing and rebuilding components, getting up early on a weekend to stoke a steam boiler, find the precise match for a particular shade of paint, or build out an archive for no reason other than that someone might need it someday. The people I know who will spend time and money running a long-forgotten machine from the turn of the century, or listening to music on records older than they are, are less interested in pining for an imaginary past than imagining an alternate future – in which, for instance, you could listen to music without it “counting.” Imagine playing a record for a room of listeners without automatically notifying the authorities, registering your preference, or influencing the song’s chart position? Simply listening for pleasure, because you enjoy it and you think your friends might too.

In immersive virtual worlds, we are seeing computer-mediated communication that encourages synchronous, face-to-face communication in an environment from which it is difficult to extract value. Virtual worlds promote a non-rivalrous universe: it doesn’t cost you any more to visit a copy of an exclusive virtual club than it costs me, and everything about the environment is identical. Travel costs are the same. What is different are the people you are with, and the bonds that you form: the only scarce resource is time, and the question of where and with whom we chose to spend it. Social media promised the impossible: that you could live multiple lives simultaneously by making “better” use of your time. Rather than a wasted bus ride, you can use that time to craft an Instagram report and increase your clout. Immersive VR is different. It requires you to spend time disconnected from your phone and social media accounts, focused only on interacting with those who are right in front of you, using your voice and body, one conversation at a time. This seems like a healthy return: media as thick social bonds rather than a quantified friend count. Discussions that proceed slowly, face-to-face. Histories of interaction that are allowed to fade, like snapshots, make for deeper, richer online social encounters.

It’s heartening that many of the early adopters of these new immersive technologies fall into overlapping constellations of queer, disabled, and neurodivergent communities (who often negotiate visibility for personal safety), and fandoms (who negotiate visibility and identity for the pure pleasure of doing so). These communities resist commercial exploitation because, despite of the lessons of web 2.0, they remain too “weird” for more “mainstream” audiences. But it is these folks that are putting in the work required to build a better future, for themselves and for their friends.

A ghost is unfinished business. Those caring for dead tech are not looking for a return, but a satisfactory resolution: a vision of an unrealised future present in the past, not so much dead as insufficiently explored. In experimenting with identity, queer communities and online fandoms aren’t necessarily looking to prove that their particular niche is better. They’re simply looking to live how they see fit, finding permission to explore among like-minded peers. I want to believe that this vision of disparate networked villages is the future. If we can shatter the vision of a single identity existing in a single frame, in its place we might find a thousand complete worlds, stronger, better connected, and more resilient than before.

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