One day I connected with Against Gravity cofounder and chief creative officer Cameron Brown for an interview in the app’s locker room. His avatar was decked out in square purple glasses, a black baseball cap, and a white tank top with an orange Rec Room logo—a simple happy face—on the front. His hand suddenly fell to the ground; the app was having network issues, he said. He whisked me away from the clamor of the locker room to a big, empty lounge with a wood floor, a Ping-Pong table, and couches that our legless bodies couldn’t actually sit on. It’s the rare private space in Rec Room, which anyone can use and invite others into. He said some people have taken to using the space for meetings, and there are a conference table and whiteboards in one corner just for that.

Since VR technology is still so new that most of us don’t have lots of friends using it, and interacting with strangers in virtual reality is about as awkward as doing so in real life, Rec Room is using slightly unconventional methods to get you to socialize. It literally forces you into games. Brown calls it “structured social.” If you and a few others enter the gym around the same time to play dodgeball, for instance, Rec Room’s software will automatically sort everyone into teams and an overly chipper, British-accented woman’s voice will suddenly start counting down the seconds until the match begins. Before you can think about it, you’re thrust into a game. “Who enjoys going to a party where you don’t know anybody, and just walking into a room and going, ‘Hi’?” he said.

True enough. Still, Rec Room’s ice-breaking methods can be jarring at first, like the time I suddenly found myself wielding a giant pen in a game of 3-D charades. Like most people, I do prefer to socialize with those whose interests I share, rather than complete strangers, and that’s not necessarily Rec Room’s aim (although you can set up private games with just your friends). Eventually, though, this sink-or-socialize tactic got me to loosen up and enjoy myself rather than stand around trying to work up the nerve to talk to others. “Even if you’re just mucking around in the locker room throwing darts into other people’s faces, you’ve kind of got a reason to be there, and before you know it, half an hour’s gone by,” Brown said.

Mindless fun or not, Rec Room was remarkable for how it gave me a sense of being in a space with other people, especially my friend who is thousands of miles away. We were giddy at being able to communicate and be together in a new way. It was much more enjoyable than Facebook Spaces, where there’s not enough to do, and another social app, AltspaceVR, where there are too many options for socializing, none very entertaining.

Avatar issues

If you’re hanging out in virtual reality, you’re going to need a body, and what this body must look like, or whether it even has to be human, depends on the context. Often, it seems cartoonish human figures are best for staying clear of the uncanny valley, since it’s still difficult to make avatars look just like us. (Probably the most realistic-looking avatar I’ve yet seen belongs to Second Life creator Philip Rosedale in his new social VR app, High Fidelity, and even that one doesn’t look quite like him.)

Regardless of how well designed your avatar is in VR, one way these worlds resemble real life is that your perceived gender shapes the interactions you have. In Rec Room and other socially geared apps, like AltspaceVR and Facebook Spaces, I prefer to make my avatar female—and preferably similar in appearance to me, with brown hair and, when it’s an option, glasses. Being true to your actual identity can make you feel that your virtual self is authentic, but as a female character you’re likely to face behavior that is obnoxious or worse.

I haven’t experienced anything that bad. The worst was when some whiny, mouth-breathing adolescent boy complained that I sucked at a game: admittedly, it pissed me off and hurt my feelings a bit. (To be fair, I was terrible at several of the games.) But Brown acknowledges that harassment can be an issue. He told me of an incident in which the fiancée of a regular Rec Room user tried out the app and found a bunch of other players instantly in her face when she entered the locker room.

Simple tools to counter these behaviors are critical, but like VR itself, they’re still very much in the experimental stage. Rec Room and AltspaceVR let you mute offensive users or build an invisible cushion around your avatar to make bullies disappear if they get too close. Rec Room also lets players vote on whether someone should be kicked out of a game. These tools will have to get more advanced and intuitive.

It could take several years for headset prices to drop and for a range of apps to figure out the interactions we want to have with each other in virtual spaces, making VR so compelling that, like the TV, PC, and smartphone, it becomes something the average person wants to use. Rec Room is not going to be that killer app for many people. But because it’s focused on certain activities and thoughtful about how to promote social interactions, it’s a good model for what’s possible. I hope it can stick around until there are many more people to play with.