Virtual Reality is a media technology. Games can be played in the medium of Virtual Reality, but many other human experiences can take place as well, like discussions and parties and meditations. And Memorial gatherings for beloved Supreme Court Justices.

Saying VR is a game is like saying print is a comic book or language is an argument.

There are reasons for positioning VR in the popular culture as a game. First, there is a well-established tradition of making money from games.

Second, and more important, it trivializes the technology and anyone who uses it. Everyone with an Oculus headset is told every single time they put it on to play safely in the little play area, as if we are children being relentlessly supervised by Mark Zuckerberg. I despise that notification and its implicit assertion that, even as a media expert with a PhD, I could not aspire to anything more than playing a game with the devices Oculus has bestowed on us.

Mark is not in VR to help the human race. Facebook is in VR to sell things to the human race, by consistently treating humans as consuming objects. No one would invest billions of dollars just to create a platform for people to hang out, have interesting social experiences, and make deep personal connections.

Beyond the relatively free lunch of VR today, everyone knows there is a plan to make all the billions back and then some. The Quest2 creates a foundation for the commercial era. We have been enjoying the heady early days, like the Internet in 1996, intoxicating possibilities.

Those of us who have realized the truth about VR need to sober up and protect what we have found. VR is the most connected form of distance communication humans have come up with yet because it doesn’t feel like distance communication.

I know that virtual spaces can help people overcome the national, racial, religious and other divisions that are key to our current system of inequality because I experience it every day in VR events.

The ability to develop networks and organize in VR could make the role of social media in the color revolutions look trivial. VR’s superpower is connection. It can be the place where different tribes meet safely.

It was not obvious that an open access drop-in event would even be manageable the morning after Election Day.

It was. It wasn’t even difficult. People were still very anxious the Morning After and some of the ones that showed up at the gathering wanted to say what they were feeling.

I was the Host and it wasn’t a free-for-all. I called on people. They said what they needed to say and sometimes I reflected something back or asked for a little more. Then I called on someone else, who could say what they were feeling. But they couldn’t argue with the person just before them.

Once someone waited about twenty minutes and then raised their avatar hand to try to argue with a past avatar statement. Nope. Just tell us what you’re thinking or feeling. Don’t try to change our minds or refute our ideas. Tells us yours, and not like reciting a checklist. Speak from where you are right now.

That was all it took and it wasn’t that hard. The more people saw it wasn’t a debating society, the more they felt free to say something that was true for them.

At one point, a woman who said she had voted for President Trump explained that she liked him because of his religiosity. I’m sure to many of the avatars present, that was a laughable statement. But no one laughed at her.

No one laughed at anybody. There’s been too much sneering and laughing. For some reason, when people meet in VR as avatars, they can be easily influenced not to do it.

Be Here Now felt like another appropriate sentiment for this time of incomprehensively rapid change.

Ram Dass recordings, even his earliest workshops that became the book, Be Here Now are are still on the Internet.

We are two weeks into what I believe will be a long-term weekly event. As the Host, I introduce the Richard Alpert-to-Ram Dass story every time at the beginning and then play a brief but substantial clip, 6–8 minutes. Ram Dass says so many noteworthy and provocative things in that amount of time that longer segments begin to wash over you, which can be nice too.

But here we want to reflect and an eight minute chunk of Ram Dass is an ample stash of ideas for that. I call on people. Almost everyone has something to say, something that Ram Dass brought up that they had never thought of that way before.

The discussion goes on for half an hour, then forty-five minutes. People have joined who missed the actual Ram Dass segment. They are just enjoying the level of interaction.

This is VR. No one will push us out of this Instance. I play the Ram Dass piece again. No one leaves.

These vignettes describe events I have led or been personally involved in. I am not writing as a journalist. I am writing as a fully immersed participant and I have an agenda.

My agenda is to build new worlds and tell new stories. The gigantic hierarchical institutions that once organized our world are dying and losing influence. The stories they tell to keep things on track aren’t working very well any more.

New networks are forming, new ways of organizing driven by new narratives of what can be done. Virtual Reality is a natural medium for a key part of that activity. Virtual Worlds are where you go to be with people from anywhere, build trust, and consider things that matter with others.

Global connections between people who can think for themselves and who will not be divided is not a game. It is the way to break the hold of old sources of influence and power who look at us as pieces on their game board.

Virtual Reality is Not a Game was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.