by Tanner Kinney
Picture this: you are in a bar with your best friends: Shaggy, Solid Snake, Garfield, and Hank Hill. You are simply talking about life, Hank and Shaggy share a toast to their struggles and Garfield complains about Mondays on a Saturday evening. Suddenly, the bar is invaded by a gang of angry penguins, all demanding typical penguin things from the bar patrons. Garfield attempts to bail, but is taken down immediately. All seems lost. However, the lost Knuckles tribe has arrived to the bar as well, and spit on the penguins harassing their queen, the beautiful Nep-Nep that sounds like a 30 year-old neck-bearded man behind his voice changer. You thank the Knuckleses (Knuckles’s? Knuckli?) for their contribution, and ask if there’s anything you can do for them. Simply, they inquire one thing:
“Do you know de wey?”
Image from Know Your Meme
This scenario is one that may seem like someone did all of the hallucinogenic drugs at once while watching Boomerang and old commercials for PlayStation games, then documented their thoughts live, but is something entirely possible thanks to the power of technology. The true purpose of virtual reality is to bring back the hit spiritual successor to Second Life, VRChat. VRChat is essentially the O.A.S.I.S. from Ready Player One, except with less shameless pop culture references and features people with personalities. The player takes on an avatar, generally some dumb meme or an anime girl, and just interacts with other people playing characters. That’s about it. The locations vary greatly, and some servers and maps are ripped one-to-one from their source, but really it is just a social simulator.
This social simulator, however, has become an internet phenomenon. Twitch streams are widely popular, with people like Pokelawls, Jameskii, and many more getting huge off of this VR craze. There may not be real money to be made in VRChat, but there’s an economy much stronger than any traditional economy: a memeconomy. The memes flow faster and stronger with every stream, and famous characters like Hank Hill are given a whole new personality that is scarily close to his original appearances. There’s too much going on in VRChat at any time that discussing its history would be akin to writing a brief history of every major event on the Earth, so I’m just going to cover a few more famous characters and happening within this wacky world.
