I’m 30 minutes into my training session when the shrieking starts, a high-pitched keening that tilts into a growl: “Gimme that Mountain, gimme that Mountain Dew.” My trainer, a blue-haired anime boy with thick, round glasses and cat ears, stands in front of me silently as a soda carton sails over our heads.
“It’s a little more scary when they raid this aisle,” he finally says with an even tone as a group of acid-green cartoon characters run past us. Most visitors to the virtual Kmart aren’t quite so unruly. He leads my avatar—noodle-thin limbs supporting a hot dog torso—to a quieter aisle, and continues explaining how to assist customers.
Here in VRChat, a virtual online platform, you can be anything you want. It’s the kind of chaotic playground where people build whodunnits to play in real-time, recruit people into their chicken cults, and, apparently, work retail jobs. For the last 30 minutes, a player by the name of J3Cube has walked me through VRChat Kmart’s store values, departments, and everything else I’d need to know to work in a virtual version of the chain retailer.
Role-playing springs up in online communities all the time, even in objectively mundane ways like pretending to be office workers or part of an ant colony. Games like Second Life provide a platform for players to create digital worlds they can live in. The Kmart of VRChat combines the best of those ideas against the backdrop of a prosaic retail job, stuffed with details taken directly from real-life stores. Novelty is what gets people in the door. But often, what makes them stay is the chance to role-play the person they’d like to become.
Most retail jobs don’t inspire nostalgia. Ericirno feels differently. (Players we spoke to for this story requested the use of only their screen names for privacy.) A former Kmart employee who worked in the electronics department, Eric refers to his old coworkers as “a little work family.” He still thinks fondly of his customers and the stories they shared about their lives.
