*Review: Arcadia Is Not a Game*
*by Ariana Sech*

*Automatically cached from vrnik.com, September 9, 2034. Note: this archive does not follow links.*

It has frequently been reported in the press that Arcadia, opened to the public last Tuesday, is the best-selling virtual-reality game of all time.

Those reports, frankly, are full of shit: Arcadia isn't a game, and that's a good thing.

It's true that the line separating game from non-game is highly arbitrary and socially constructed. The shift in the meaning of "game" in the 21st century has mirrored the changes in the term "art." Art became less about specific modes, like painting or sculpture, and more about what you _do_ with art: appreciate its aesthetics, interrogate its cultural position, in a certain environment, and then move on.

Similarly, the mainstreaming of visual novels and minimalist games that played with the form's purpose made that purpose central: a game is something you play, in order to win, or reach a certain goal, or get to the end. The notion of _video_ game introduces specific cultural forms, media, and symbols on top of that; something is a video game if it comes from the tradition of video games.

I visited Arcadia for eight hours, though only 1:45 elapsed on the stopwatch beside my VR rig. Its creators—Skadi Hemera, 20, and Seong Iseul, 19—funded this entire project with their lovingly crafted porn VR enviros, a fact that they readily admit but which is underreported. I might be the only paid journalist reporting on Arcadia who has actually purchased enviros like Cloverleaf Academy.

In Cloverleaf, the game put you into the mind of one of twenty girls, and temporarily bent your own emotions to match hers. As I wrote [in my Cloverleaf review](#), I found this a profoundly strange, but ultimately fulfilling, experience.

The character creation in Arcadia, though surpassingly more detailed and varied, provides the same lack of choice. In a VR MMO like [Warmachine 2](#), last year's top seller, you pick from a limited menu of pre-selected sense-capture bodies and then get to customize colors. As I wrote, walking around felt lumbering and awkward for me in that game. In Arcadia, you just wake up and you're there. There's even an explicit nod to Cloverleaf, in the form of the mirror you wake up holding in your hand, so you can find out what you look like.

Arcadian bodies are still limited—they're airbrushed and esthetically pleasing, and none are especially masculine—but no two are alike. I saw angels, demons, catgirls, cyborgs, cyborg catgirls, bipedal half-dragons, and at least 20 different kinds of elves, of which I was one.

Specifically, I woke up as a plant-elf, with the ability to shoot vines out of my palms, and to sense and gently manipulate some of the dizzying array of flora that surrounded me. Walking around in the ultra-lush environment felt significantly better than doing so in my [occasionally marathon-running](#) human body.

The gravity was lower and I was stronger; I could take huge leaps across fields and somersault in midair, and every fiber of my body felt great. I ended up spending as much time in the rural environs outside my starting city of Caerwy as inside it. If my joy in walking around was facilitated by mental changes—and given Cloverleaf, it may well have been—they were subtle, and I didn't notice them.

My last hour was devoted to an interview, but the first seven went by quickly. After frolicking in the fields for a while, I decamped to the Red Mare, which has the high-fantasy name of a tavern, but is a much more complicated creature. There are corners of it that are all rough wood and benches, but they fade seamlessly into glass-and-plastic white corners with huge windows that look like college-town coffee shops.

A golden-skinned sun-elf waitress came to take my order, assuring me everything was free. Rather than look at the menu, I just made something up—"um...a blueberry lambic?"—and got a delicious drink within thirty seconds.

The sun-elf pointed out the bookshelves scattered around. My hand went instinctively towards a volume that pertained to the role of great plant-elves in the history of Arcadia. Somehow, I seemed to have vague memories of figures I'd never heard of, like the great healer and chemist, Gaisela Chae, who must have created journalism in this world, as she discovered caffeine. I read her lore with interest as I drank; the tiny philosophical asides and historical tightness of the narrative made me feel like I had a lot to work on as a writer.

From there, I explored the city, frequently making use of Caerwy's intuitive rapid-transit system, known as the Rails. The Rails run in a grid pattern about twenty feet off the ground, with stops frequent and carefully placed enough that you can usually see the next one in any direction. Even if I couldn't, my sense-memory told me where to go.

The Rails required no tickets—as far as I could tell, money wasn't a thing in Arcadia. I watched a spontaneous weightlifting contest for a while, where a glowing angel with huge black wings who must have been ten feet tall took on all comers lifting boulders of incredible size. In the end, a black dragon-girl exactly tied her in strength. It emerged that they knew each other somehow, and they ended up flying away together, holding hands.

Sex is also an option in Arcadia, a fact that some reviewers seemed to have missed and others were rather opaque about. Granted, people don't rut in the streets out of politeness, and they won't proposition you unless you're interested. But if you _are_ DTF, you're certain to get a stream of whispers in your ears and surreptitious notes passed to you.

I'm no longer being paid to write sex toy reviews, but I can confirm from multiple data points that the succubi and succubae of Caerwy are very knowledgeable on the topic, and have astonishingly well-stocked apartments. My aforementioned ability to shoot vines from my palms also came in handy. And, yes, I came my brains out. Repeatedly. You will too.

Skadi and Iseul met me for an interview in another tavern, this one almost empty. To get there, I had to take a portal to the restricted-access city of Ys, where the creators, who are legally married in South Korea, say they live full-time. They would not allow me to take photographs or video back, although they did facilitate an audio recording.

Iseul was wearing a tight leash around her elegant neck, which Skadi held loosely in her hand. A moon-elf waitress, her skin slate-blue, brought us all different drinks partway through the interview; I received an unusual rose-and-fruit-flavored coffee that proved to be one of the best things I had ever consumed.

The first half of the interview follows; the second half will be posted tomorrow, along with my overall conclusions about Arcadia.

***

Ariana: Thank you for having me.

Skadi: Of course.

Iseul: We are actually both fans of your work.

Skadi: Iseul-pet turned me on to your stuff; she forwarded me your Cloverleaf review. We looked at what you considered the strengths and weaknesses of that enviro—

Iseul: Hearing about how having your memories change suddenly is wrenching, even if you're forewarned, and making that more of a thing that dovetails with your existing memories, your new history in the new environment. Of *course* we'd always _wanted_ to do that better, but there were, and are, a lot of limitations in VR. We needed to know what to make a priority, if we wanted Arcadia to appeal to everyone who needed it.

Skadi: Like, yeah. There were people who got off on having their identity changed in a rather harsh way, but that's a minority of people. People who want that here can still get that, but they have to opt in.

Ariana: The Proteus Potions, right?

Skadi: There are other things planned, but yes, those are a great example of what we're trying to do.

Ariana: I wanted to ask you a pretty broad question, and I'll start by saying some things I noticed about Arcadia. I saw no invading barbarian hordes, or dire wolves, or invading aliens with ray guns. The only place I saw a punch successfully thrown was in a cage fight for fun; those huge policewomen always seem to get there in time and separate people. Now, the New York Times—

*(Skadi is already laughing.)*

—they referred to Arcadia as "the newest MMORPG," and compared you to Warmachine 2—

Skadi *(in tears from laughter)*: No. Just... no.

Iseul *(also laughing)*: Your observations are so fucking on point. There have been a few articles like that. Someone looked at some screenshots. They didn't play the game. Arcadia made them uncomfortable, and they didn't want to play it. So they just made shit up. It's amazing. This is totally new to us. No one bothered to make things up about Cloverfield Academy or Razor Slut.

Skadi: Like okay. Let me give you an idea of how much Arcadia is like Warmachine 2. If they'd give us the license, I could set up a VR booth in Caerwy where _you could play Warmachine 2._ And then you could come out of the VR booth and you'd still be here.

Ariana: Yeah. It's, like, a _place_—

Iseul: It's a platform.

Skadi: Yeah, a platform. It's not even a _game_, not really, despite how we all casually refer to it. Arcadia is a place that has activities inside of it. Actually, it might not even be like a platform. It might be more like a trade conference where games are advertised, if you want to keep going with that conceit. It's a bit complicated because, like, it uses common VR things and regular VR rigs, so you could still say VR is the platform, but there are a bunch of things going on server-side that frankly make up an entirely new kind of thing. But they're proprietary and I can't talk about them.

Ariana: The rumors that you've built strong AI—

Skadi: Yeah, it's proprietary. We wouldn't comment even if our lawyers hadn't _expressly_ advised us to shut up. People don't know what they're talking about.

Iseul: What we _do_ have, we're trying to use to make people happy. The worst thing right now is that VR rigs are still too expensive for some people. Part of why we're charging $400 is so we can throw some of that money at the VR manufacturing process and make those cheaper; that's in the works.

We also give some rigs and games away, when we can. It still costs like three grand for a VR rig, and more for the surgery. I think that's a crime against humanity. Long-term, access to Arcadia should be free for everyone.

Ariana: Of course, there are some people who will be, and are, upset just because you've limited the gender options. You could have maybe doubled your audience.

Iseul: Some people won't try Arcadia, and that's fine. But keep in mind that this is by _far_ the most broad-minded VR _anything_ in terms of gender. That includes shit like general-purpose business VR. You still have to go in and be a short woman or a tall man, even if that's not who you are. This is the year 2034. Arcadia is, like, the one place where you can't be a tall guy. Some of these shitlords of industry need to take the plank out of their own fucking eyes.

Ariana: That's all true. I've written [about gender in business sims](#) in the past, and about [how the only women over 5 feet in the original Warmachine were white](#). That said, everyone else in the VR business is struggling with technical limitations that you have clearly overcome.

You're not sense-capturing a union worker in California when you implement funky plant stuff like this— *(Ariana extends a vine from her palm, using it to lift her coffee.)* Or any one of a million other wonderful little things like that. I really do get the sense that you have a general-purpose solution set, and you put in restrictions intentionally.

Skadi: Again, some of this is proprietary, but it's not quite like that. Including more body-forms actually would have taken longer, and delayed the game's release. So it wouldn't have been free. But, hey. I remember what Warmachine told you when you wrote that article. They said, "we are going for a certain aesthetic"—

Ariana: "that pleases our customers," right.

Skadi: Right. And that aesthetic happened to be racist, and it happened to be sexist, and all of these other things, because the choices they made all went in one direction, in every fucking game they made, and they alienated any other kind of customer they might get. Just like every other company in their fucking collusive industry that gave us no funding and no help, and we had to do everything ourselves. But you know what? That might have been a blessing.

Ariana: Because you could make a—a platform, then, a place, that doesn't fit with the echo chamber of what everyone has been pushing, right? So maybe Arcadia has these restrictions, where guys can't be taller than six feet, but it also has the most language options of anything ever released for VR and, like, [trans genitals](#)—

Iseul: And _tentacle_ genitals.

*(Iseul and Skadi laugh.)*

Skadi: True, those too. I haven't been bringing that up, because Arcadia is going so mainstream, even though, well, sex is mainstream. But the press is still weird about it. Maybe I should. I should just lead all the fucking commercials from now on with Arcadia: We Have Trans Gens. Like, that's one of a few reasons my pet and I first started doing porn VR. As it's been widely reported, Iseul and I are both trans—

Iseul: On that note, to the asshole who leaked an old photo of Skadi, you're not welcome in Arcadia. That shit is not cool, it's disrespectful.

Skadi: Thank you.

*(Skadi kisses Iseul briefly.)*

Skadi: But, yeah. Almost every porn enviro back then was a choice between playing as a cis boy or a cis girl. The trans girl stuff that _was_ out there was a very awkward and stylized thing that wasn't true to our actual sex lives, and rarely matched our desires. We proved there was a demand for something better. No one ever talks about the genitals in mainstream VR stuff, but, look, they're getting mapped anyway. They're part of your body. So what was needed was a continuum, an efflorescence of different possibilities, so that people who weren't comfortable anywhere else could be comfortable here.

Iseul: I have heard a few stories about people who visited Arcadia and bailed immediately, because the software figured out they were transgender before they were ready to accept that. Then, a few days later, they would come back. And they would write us these long, heartfelt letters—I fucking wish I could show them to you, but I think they'd want those private.

But they basically said: however we did it, we told them something about ourselves that they'd kept so hidden, so suppressed, that they weren't prepared for it at first. But now they _know_ who they are, and even if the society around them doesn't accept it or makes them keep it private, in Arcadia, they're not judged, they're embraced, and the weight of the world is off their shoulders because they _know._ And that is a fucking amazing thing.

Skadi: I don't regret doing anything that saves people's lives like that. And what do you measure that against, what's the counterpoint? That some alpha bro doesn't want to come here because he can't be as big as all the big strong scary women? Maybe a person with that kind of attitude is not a person who we necessarily want.

We *do* want the people who have nowhere else to go. Arcadia is a love letter and a lifeboat to them. I want to rescue as many as I can.

---

[*Editor's note: Ms. Sech ceased writing for us after the submission of this interview. When asked, Ms. Sech reported only that she was "doing fine" and "not to worry about" her.*]