Anyland is a social VR experience focusing on worldbuilding and avatar creation tools that allow you to create interactive experiences while in VR. They’ve also implemented an open sharing feature that makes it easy to collect objects from the world and share them with other people. Stephanie Mendoza is a VR developer and artist who has spent a lot of time creating worlds and exploring the gift economy dynamics within Anyland, and I had a chance to capture some of her stories and social experiments.

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Stephanie talks about the social status that comes with discovering bugs and glitches, documenting her adventures of agency expression and interactions with trolls, and how VR has been helping her have lucid dreams that have featured Anyland’s worldbuilding user interfaces.

Here’s an overview of Anyland:

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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip

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Kent Bye
  • Darwiniantheory

    I’ve been an Anylander for almost a year now and have spent just over 700 hours building and making friends in the community.

    The beauty of Anyland over ‘social vr’ is with everything else you just chuck things about and talk about other games and where about someone you are in the world… then you leave and generally feel disappointed and don’t return! In Anyland your actually doing something, your creating the world and seeing what other people have done which puts it way ahead of everything else.

    Everything in Anyland is made in Anyland, so you appreciate it’s all crafted by hand in vr, it’s programed in vr and only experienced in … well VR.

    The community doesn’t feel forced in any way and we are always helpful to new people and it’s amazing how fast they pick up the tips and tricks and before long they have created words and are sharing creations and ideas also.

    Yes the graphics are simple, but using the tools you can make some pretty amazing stuff and as the podcast said, there are some glitches but they can be fun too!

    The description to a burning man festival is quite apt. Nothing is impossible and … well some things are unavailable but The Devs update often and come in to see us all:)

    So if you have VR you should get Anyland.

    Best description would be it’s not something you play… it’s a place you go!

  • Jeff Axline

    700 hours!?! I’m only at 530. This game is really what VR is all about. Build your own reality and see the different creation styles of others. Lots of great builders in there and a real sense of community. Due to the basic nature of the game there’s new content all the time.

  • Alex

    Hey nroadtovr, when are you going to approve my comment? It got marked as spam, but I wanted to share my experience in Anyland.