Joke Jam World Row is Live
Good news! I’ve meticulously scanned through all of your entries, and it looks like… *checks notes* … all of you are going to be banned! Next time, maybe consider submitting worlds with more mirrors? Or maybe, I don’t know, more jokes? Anyway, I can now announce myself as the Joke Jam Champion, and thus, the funniest person in VRCha… VR…
You can hear a long, drawn-out series of 80’s-style powering-down noises.
Whew, that was close. Okay, we’ve managed to successfully subdue System, which means we can actually announce that the Joke Jam world row has gone live!
If you missed the initial trailer, Joke Jam was designed to get world creators crafting jokes, gags, and any sort of gimmick that would get people to laugh together. Additionally, creators had a couple technical requirements to keep things interesting.
Contrary to System’s, uh, critique, we were extremely impressed with all the entries in this Jam, all of which hit the theme in unique and creative ways. While we’d love to say we were surprised with how good they were, we’d be lying – after all, this is the VRChat community we’re talking about here.
The world row isn’t the only thing we have to talk about, however.
An Early Look at Udon Analytics
You might have noticed that one requirement of the Joke Jam was using either the Bop System or writing your own system with the VRCJokeJamTracker. Now that the Jam row is live, we can reveal that this is actually an alpha test of a new analytics system for creators!
That’s how we know there have been precisely 666,060 Bops in our demo world since the Jam began.
If your world used the VRCJokeJamTracker and was accepted into the Featured Row, we’ve added a special tag that allows the Tracker to work in your world, so you can see the number of times someone had their head bopped across all instances of your world.
You can see this number by visiting your World Page with the account that made the world. If you tracked something else – like the number of times the Cat caught the Laser Dot – you will still see it listed as “Bops,” but it refers to whatever you tracked.
This system only works within the selected Jam worlds, and will be turned off before the next world jam.
What Data is Tracked?
Of course, we realize the inclusion of a system like this raises a lot of eyebrows! Here is the exact data that is saved – no personal information is included:
ID of the current world
Your position in the world
The current time
An integer “value” – always “1” for the JokeJamTracker
The data is sent directly to our own database.
What’s Next for Creators
Now that you know what the VRCJokeJamTracker does, you may want to change your functionality a little to make better use of it.
If you do, and you’d like to reset your analytics after the change, you can request this in the #vrchat-jams channel of our Discord. Please make sure to include a link to the world (and keep your request simple).
We’ll unlock additional abilities in the future, but for now, keep your analytics limited to a single event type.
In the future, you’ll be able to change the ID of the event as well as the value you’re saving. This opens up many possibilities for your world:
Let players leave ‘tags’ around your world like “Can’t Reach”, “Beautiful View” and “Low Framerate”, which you can explore in the Editor to fix issues.
Track which areas have few visitors to make changes.
Ask multiple-choice questions to get direct feedback.
Have people vote on future additions!
While these are some basic ideas of what could be done with this feature, it is experimental, and we’re still in the process of developing it. We’ll be reaching out to the creators selected for the Featured Row for feedback in the coming weeks.
We hope you have fun exploring the worlds your fellow VRChat users built during the last two weeks. Even if you didn’t participate in this Jam, we’d encourage you to join in the next one! As always, keep your eyes open for the next theme to be released in the coming months — and finally, don’t forget to check out the Joke Jam World Row, which you can find at the top of the World Menu!
For press or media inquiries, please contact press@vrchat.com
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