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Virtual Photography

Virtual photography is the art of the taking images/screenshots from games and virtual worlds.

I would like to see some of your best shots!

here are some of mine

Spiderman

Spiderman

Sea of Thieves

Horizon Zero Dawn

Final Fantasy 15

Created at 9:56pm, 8th May, 2024. Page last updated at 2:44pm, 16th May, 2024.

AlexGoesTheWorld 5/9/2024, 7:24:11 AM

You mean an already dying hobby, thanks to social media as much as its people?! xD

Until an year ago it was a thriving community where as a new vper you were seen, now it's becoming a community of groups clustered around few chic vpers, playing all the cool games, turned on themselves, more interested in basking in their own glory and resonance chambers. The social media aspect, licking each other's and the like is, by now, more important than the vp itself. Changes in social media and their algorithms didn't help, in fact, they accelerated the social problem.

Not saying it's going to disappear today, nor tomorrow, but the hobby already started the downhill road to go back into a more niche hobby.

BoomerMod5/9/2024, 3:32:33 PM

AlexGoesTheWorld

That's really unfortunate. I always saw virtual photography as an evolution of machinima, and I always found those communities to be really supportive.

I wonder how much of it is because machinima grew out of demoscene, which was more person-to-person rather than person-to-audience? Whatever the reason, it's nice to see more games embracing photography mode, as I really enjoy seeing what people can do with it 🙂

AlexGoesTheWorld 5/9/2024, 4:36:15 PM

Boomer

It changed in the last year. When I first joined I was surprised by how open, supportive the community was and how easy was to be seen, people actually cared about doing VP. People followed you and liked your content, they didn't followed you just to get a follow back.

Then, it started changing... social media and algorithms changed and things started to go downhill... by now a good shot or a bad shot has more or less the same reach/interactions/feedback from the community which is very low.

On IG, they started doing the "partner" thing, where you reshare only, or mostly, the post of a specific group of people: you're not in someone's partner group, you started loosing visibility. Then IG changed algorithms even more in the last pair of months and it got terrible. Twitter/X started going downhill when Elon Musk bought it and it's there... it floats.

Many community pages on IG and Twitter died and the few remained are either too chic to reshare most vpers work or do what they can (VPCollective on IG and VGPNetwork on X always be praised). Some people hosts contest but in contests... we all know who is going to win: the usual big names with the name, the following, the experience, the money and all the games. At the same time IG/X went their ways, some pieces of community moved to dedicated app/websites that are even more insulated and isolated from the rest of the world.

And don't you dare voicing distress/critique/any kind of "I don't like how things are" or you risk getting ghosted at best and personally attacked and insulted by people inside the community at worse.

The FF14 vp scene is even worse: you're invisible by default and nobody recognizes a good shot if you're not one that is 24/7 active.

Makster 5/9/2024, 10:28:56 AM

FFXV seriously overlooked but I love the whole aesthetic and vibes. As a boy that spent many summer camps with the guys hiking, camping, fishing, and goofing off in the lakes this definitely captures that sorta mood