One of the strangest moments of this year's US presidential election has been immortalized in VRChat, with players recreating the bizarre Four Seasons Total Landscaping venue the Trump campaign booked by accident. VRChat is an MMO sandbox game where players can talk and interact in a variety of rooms and maps with highly customizable avatars. It's more of a social platform than game and is used by niche communities to socialize, chat, and play a handful of minigames, which range from Capture the Flag to target practice. It's so ingrained in online culture by this point that even a functional version of the smash hit social deduction game Among Us has made it to VRChat in a fan-made mod.
Such a community-driven game is always going to reflect what's going on in world news and popular culture, and nothing has dominated the world more in the past week than the US general election. After a tumultuous week, an incredibly strange series of events surrounding a press conference for Trump's lawyers took place to cap off the losing incumbent's presidency. Donald Trump tweeted that the conference would take place at "Four Seasons," which most assumed to mean the luxury hotel chain; instead, it turned out to be "Four Seasons Total Landscaping," a landscaping store sandwiched between a crematorium and an adult entertainment shop. The inexplicable setting coupled with the fact that the race was called for former Vice President Joe Biden midway (prompting most of the press to leave), was ridiculed online as a hilarious failure. No reason for the choice of location has yet been given, but it's widely assumed to have been reserved in error.
The Verge reports the parking lot of the Four Seasons has now been modded into VRChat, and was used by a community of furries as the site of a virtual party. The map was made in five hours, according to modder and party host thecoopertom, and was impressively detailed, down to the hanging wiring and "Trump 2020" posters plastered on the garage door. The map was christened by a group of furries, as that community is prominent on VRChat thanks to its full-body capture and intricate custom avatars making helpful virtual fursonas an easy fit for the game. The partygoers praised the accuracy of the map and set off fireworks to celebrate Joe Biden's election win.
Coopertom and his furry friends were not the only ones to celebrate Biden's projected win, as they were joined by the voices of Twitch's most prominent streamers. Few festivities have matched this feral function in terms of ridiculousness, which shows the versatility and potential of VR as the world eagerly awaits the next steps in virtual reality gaming, even though it could be a long ways off. The map has been made available to download, with a slight update: replacing the "Trump" signs to instead read "Dump."
The public might never learn the true story of why the parking lot of a small landscaping store was used as the site of one of the last press conferences of the Trump administration, but this strange bit of American history will now live on as a VRChat map. It's up to the community to determine what shenanigans occur in front of the virtual Four Seasons Total Landscaping, but VRChat is a great place to immerse oneself in modern history.
Sources: The Verge, thecoopertom