A man with no face rises into the sky. Thanks to a stray beam of artificial sunlight, it almost appears he has a halo. Onlookers gather to gawk. One manages to shout louder than the rest. “It’s God!” he bellows. Everybody else bursts into uproarious laughter. It’s the first day of “OfflineTV VR,” a temporary virtual space meant to replicate the feel of a real-life pop-up event the eponymous streamer collective held in LA the weekend prior. For now, fans are making their own fun manipulating its glitches. It’s probably not what the brands that built this monument to Twitch’s wholesome eightsome intended, but it’s something.
OfflineTV is a group of eight collaborators and former housemates that includes stars like Imane “Pokimane” Anys, Jeremy “DisguisedToast” Wang and Lily “LilyPichu” Ki. Even among top Twitch streamers, the group has developed a uniquely passionate fan base numbering in the millions that regularly trades in fan art, fan fiction, and memes. When OfflineTV announced the first in-person Los Angeles pop-up in partnership with McDonald’s, tickets sold out in a heartbeat. To expand the partnership, and accommodate those fans that couldn’t attend in person, the brands constructed “OfflineTV VR” a limited time virtual space accessible via VR platforms, as well as PCs, Macs and smartphones. Its big debut was rocky.
When I joined a server minutes after it opened, my avatar spawned not into the event space itself, but out in a floating limbo overlooking what appeared to be a photorealistic stretch of L.A. highway. For a moment, I was concerned I was going to plummet hundreds of feet to my in-game death, but my avatar — a legless torso with no discernible facial features — moved as though he was standing on solid ground. So I trudged toward a floating building in the sky, which thankfully turned out to be the “OfflineTV VR” venue.
At first glance, it was a spectacle, filled with some of the same art and exhibits as the real-life OfflineTV pop-up, but scaled up to make these down-to-earth content creators seem like larger-than-life titans. Each OfflineTV streamer got their own exhibit. Wang’s made an especially eye-popping statement, with massive statues of his mustachioed toast mascot looming. Halls and walls, meanwhile, were adorned with countless pictures of the OfflineTV crew palling around and chilling out. The space itself was open and clean, with cavernous ceilings, lavish pillars and a wood grain floor texture. The general vibe landed somewhere between museum and tech start-up office. There were lots of palm trees.
It quickly became apparent, however, that there wasn’t all that much to do. This was not entirely surprising; an OfflineTV representative said in an email that “OfflineTV VR” was built primarily by McDonald’s agency partner, IW Group, in just three weeks. The space’s main activity was a scavenger hunt for various pieces of OfflineTV and McDonald’s imagery that, once completed, awarded fans with OfflineTV-themed wallpaper for their phones and computers. Fans were also supposed to be able to leave Post-it note messages to OfflineTV streamers in a nod to a popular attraction at the real-life pop-up, but that functionality did not appear to be working when I first logged in.
Crucially, unlike in Los Angeles, there would be no formal meet and greet. In an email to The Post, an OfflineTV representative explained that it would have been difficult due to “server capacity per link and platform capabilities that are still being updated.” In short, because of those limitations, OfflineTV stars would have needed to visit 40 different versions of the space to meet with all 5,000 fans who RSVPed for the experience.
Instead, OfflineTV told fans that streamers “might pop in and out throughout the week.” Fans present for “OfflineTV VR’s” opening hours expressed disappointment over voice chat.
“I thought there’d be a video at least of them answering questions,” said one.
“It’s just wallpapers?” asked another. “That sucks.”
As users discovered they could pass through any object and glitch into the sky, the illusion began to crumble.
“I think they intended this to be way cooler,” said one OfflineTV fan. “It’s a low-poly McDonald’s that has broken trees.”
A few fans figured out how to use their webcams to map their real faces onto plastic-y digital avatars — a peak uncanny valley moment — and numerous others gathered to gaze into their glassy eyes.
“Is this what it’s like to be [OfflineTV streamer] Michael Reeves?” joked one of the users in response to a mass of awestruck onlookers crowding around him after he applied a temporary tattoo of his own face to a digital mannequin.
During the time I spent in the space on opening day, I repeatedly flashed back to a real-world event I attended involving one of OfflineTV’s most popular members: a pizza party hosted by Anys at TwitchCon 2019. Despite the name, it wasn’t much of a party at all. Instead, it was more of a line — a long one. Hundreds of fans waited for two hours to grab a slice of pizza from a San Diego pizza restaurant and snap a quick photo with OfflineTV’s quirky queen of cool. Each was then made to leave, efficiently replaced by another fan holding an equally greasy slice of pizza.
That IRL event showed the limits of the friendly intimacy livestreams project, the feeling that serves as the foundation of streamers’ appeal compared to more traditional, cordoned-off stars. After a certain point, stardom is stardom, no matter how chill and accessible you make yourself seem. If enough eyeballs follow your every move and enough hands want to reach out and touch you, you necessarily become something else — something removed from the general populace, if only for your own safety and sanity. It seems that even a virtual space, free from the confines of the physical world, does not entirely change that. No human being can be everywhere at once. But a brand, in some sense, can be — at the cost of authentic, face-to-face humanity.
Lacking the live personalities of the OfflineTV crew, the VR experience evoked a very different sentiment than their streams and videos. One especially incensed fan gave voice to the stars-versus-normies sentiment: “Literally, it’s a museum of them flexing on you that they have a better life than you,” he grumbled. “That’s this entire thing.”
But “OfflineTV VR” also reminded me of the camaraderie that emerged from that long wait for a short photo op in 2019. Back then, expectant fans excitedly conversed, piling in-jokes on top of in-jokes like they were trying to build a Jenga tower made of memes. Fans did the same in this case, too. They got something out of “OfflineTV VR,” even if it wasn’t the buzzy, brand-friendly something the metaverse event meant to convey.
I logged out of “OfflineTV VR” after a couple hours, but I checked in again toward the middle of the week to see if I could find any streamers. I never did, unfortunately, though the OfflineTV representative said they had been “dropping in sporadically throughout the week and watching our fans interact with each other.” General sentiment online seemed relatively positive, with fans on Twitter and OfflineTV’s subreddit saying that they enjoyed exploring the space, even if they, too, weren’t reporting any streamer sightings.
I logged back in on the final day, Friday of last week. By that point, every server I joined was a ghost town. However, the Post-It note feature had been consistently functional for days, so walls were lined with user-created notes that gushed praise.
“Hey OTV! I’m from Mexico, and I just wanted to let you know that your content literally saved my life,” read one. “I wish one day I can thank you face to face.”
“Thank you for making quarantine less miserable and bringing so much comfy vibes,” read another.
Some were addressed to specific streamers. “Toast, you inspire me to say what’s on my mind and to do what I think is right, and I thank you for that,” a note next to Wang’s exhibit said. “I’ve always been a shy person, but watching you made me feel more confident in myself.”
The notes were remarkably positive, given that it was seemingly possible to write anything, including the sorts of critiques fans issued previously over voice chat. For the purposes of science, I posted multiple profanities on the walls and logged out to see if servers would scrub them after I left. They stayed up. Either moderation on Spatial, the metaverse platform used by OfflineTV, is relatively light, or OfflineTV’s die-hard fans are so appreciative that they can even ignore the overwhelming urge to troll.
It was strange wandering several copies of the same abandoned hall, though. It was like logging into a massively multiplayer role-playing game whose player base had moved on years ago, leaving behind only detritus of their glory days.
But I knew, consciously, that these worlds had been born just a week prior. Now they were at death’s door, with the end mere hours away. In the short time “OfflineTV VR” existed, I wondered how many friendships had been forged through a haze of shared interests and awkward glitchiness. I wondered how many heartfelt messages had gone unread. I wondered if anybody had bothered to chronicle much of it at all.
“OfflineTV VR” vanished after it had outlived its usefulness, but also before its time. In that sense, brand-constructed metaverse spaces have a lot in common with pop-up stores: They’re not built to last. They exist to attract — to get people in the door with buzzwords and manufactured scarcity and then send them on their way.
A world with that ethos as its foundation inevitably has an expiration date, no matter how much history thousands of people are able to generate in the short time it exists. This particular imagining of the metaverse promises an Internet that is perhaps more immersive, but certainly more temporary. That’s ideal for brands — and perhaps even for people who have become brands. It remains to be seen what it means for people.