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.

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

Admittedly, now seems to be a time of reckoning for social VR. Earlier this month, High Fidelity, an ambitious platform from Second Life creator Philip Rosedale, laid off a quarter of its 80-person staff and pivoted toward enterprise communication. "If you had asked me when we started the company in 2014, I'd have said that by now there would be several million people using [head-mounted displays] daily, and we'd be competing with both big and small companies to provide the best platform—but I was wrong," Rosedale wrote in a blog post. "Daily headset use is only in the tens of thousands, almost all for entertainment and media consumption, with very little in the way of general communication, work, or education."