Furry Ex Machina: How Does VRChat Allow for Modern Instances of Digital Identity Generation and Immersion in the Furry Fandom?

This paper proposes examining VRChat as a site of avatar embodiment and immersion for the furry fandom, a community whose members often treat their anthropomorphic animal avatars, or fursonas, as extensions of their selves or idealized identities. The author argues that VRChat qualifies as a video game under Aarseth et al.'s multidimensional typology, being a first-person, multiplayer environment with dynamic worlds and open-ended goals, and therefore merits analysis through game studies frameworks. The work positions itself within existing scholarship on VRChat's social connectedness, embodiment, and identity formation, while identifying a gap in research that focuses specifically on how personal attachment to avatars shapes these experiences within a particular community.

The paper engages critically with Brown and Cairns' (2004) model of immersion, which progresses from engagement through engrossment to total immersion, a state described as involving detachment from reality. The author notes that this model has been criticized for failing to account for different modes of player involvement and for its arguably limited universality. The central argument is that the encompassing nature of VR technology reduces opportunities for distraction, potentially allowing researchers to study this "highest stage" of immersion in a more sustained rather than fleeting form than traditional desktop games permit.

The furry fandom is presented as a suitable community for this inquiry because of its long history of adopting successive online platforms, from text-based MUCKs in the 1990s to Second Life, which introduced visual avatars viewed from a third-person perspective. The paper suggests VRChat may represent the next stage in this progression, given its extensive avatar customization options, which allow users to commission or create 3D models of their fursonas, and its support for body language and non-verbal communication through physical mimicry. The author acknowledges that embodiment levels differ between full VR and desktop modes but argues this does not undermine the proposed research direction.

The stated goals of the future work are to examine VRChat as a site of embodiment, test its potential for achieving total immersion, and address the scarcity of academic literature on both VRChat and furry media. The paper is an extended abstract, and its claims about the furry community's embodiment practices are presented as initial observations rather than empirically established findings.