As Social VR Grows, Users Are the Ones Building Its Worlds

When Rec Room launched in the summer of 2016, it didn't feel like a platform for social virtual reality as much as it did a collection of mini-games. You could change the clothes your avatar was wearing, sure, and you could talk to folks you met in the game's gym-like central hub. You could even play dodgeball or paintball against them. But despite its fun, cartoonish aesthetic and its up-with-people vibe, it was very much a work in progress.

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But that was three very long years ago. Today, Rec Room is a vibrant social world. But even more than that, through a series of ambitious updates, it's become a nexus for expression as well. Armed with a suite of creative tools, users have built custom environments that reenact everything from Pixar movies to Beatles album covers. There are mega-scale playable Monopoly boards and explorable dungeons; creators market their live DJ sets and comedy shows on Instagram. At this point, two-thirds of all time spent in Rec Room happens inside user-generated rooms, some of which have attracted more than 500,000 visitors. And as one of two social titles available at launch for the stand-alone Oculus Quest—and with an iOS version opening for beta sign-up—it's poised to keep growing.

"We've done about 5 percent of what we want to do so far," says Nick Fajt, CEO of Against Gravity, the Seattle studio behind Rec Room. "We feel like VR and AR are inevitable. I don't know if that's two years from now or 10 years from now, but there's a ton of things that we can do in the interim that takes our platform and our tool set a little bit closer."

I should point out that Fajt says this to me during a wide-ranging discussion inside Rec Room, where he and head of community Shawn Whiting are guiding me through some of their favorite user-generated spaces. There's a verdant Shire-like environment called "Hobbits," where nighttime brings fireworks shows. There's seaside village Valley of the Dark, where we took a selfie with Rec Room's in-game camera. There's even a reconstruction of the platform where Luke and Darth Vader faced off in The Empire Strikes Back, complete with R2-D2, a wieldable lightsaber, and the ability to fall through Cloud City's endless ventilation shaft. (Which, reader, I did.)

Against Gravity