i've been a regular of vrchat for like two years and i know how much goes on like. literally every day and how many personal stories and very sincere personal dramas and life altering changes have happened for people because of them. like people have found life partners in these things. people have made memorials to dead friends who those around them knew very personally and deeply. people held frequent events like comedy clubs or DJ events or creative workshops or the like. and we can just go there and see the remnants of these things - we can see the virtual memorials and funeral worlds, we can see the posters for regular events people put on, the weird things people have made, sometimes the disturbing things like people making cults. but no one is there anymore. we see their names all over the place, personal messages to loved ones, words people put down about ancient drama that no longer exists. there was more going on in these than like, a chatroom - because chats are ephemeral and they're just text, but this is people making physical places and things and you can actually observe these spaces people used to be in. we see the evidence of life and people being around each other and having at least a little part of their lives take place online, but we have absolutely no context for it, and we have no idea how many or how deep it went for them. and its been happening for decades and theres so many things we just got to guess on. its like a ghost story. i think theres something incredibly haunting and deeply sad about that much history about communities that used to be large and have their own cultures, and countless lives that got tied up in that, however niche, thats just completely unknown. it's like thinking about the lives of a medieval peasant, or discovering a completely wiped out ancient culture also the aesthetics of these worlds are just incredibly creepy and empty already lol seriously, look up worlds.com archaeology videos at some point - its startling to see them do literally exactly what we've been doing on vrchat like. two decades ago. down to paid VIP memberships to certain clubs, or like, avatar creation workshops its nothing new, we just keep forgetting our history and culture because nobody was documnting it.
Interesting!
What you're describing seems like something like a haunted house -- a relic of a now-vanished world that nonetheless retains traces of its past inhabitants, in some cases even down to the feelings and desires those inhabitants had. With the added detail that the ghosts would be much easier to see if they weren't constantly whispering to each other on the other side of the walls.
