This feature is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.“We’re looking for retards,” the hot anime girl tells me, albeit with the voice of a twenty-something Australian man. I have joined my first world in VRChat, a virtual-reality platform that lets you explore any number of limitless, user-created realms by beaming them straight into some plastic goggles on your head. Joining me on my maiden voyage are two intrepid hunters from Down Under who also happen to be popping their VRChat cherry, and they waste no time in telling me their plan for the evening: to find freaks.VRChat is a sort of online hangout game that would be fairly innocuous were it not full of racists, furries, and trolls. Its public lobbies, holding pens for those who find themselves in-between worlds, are a cacophony of slurs and copyright infringement, which (if you’re anxious about such things) kids can access with ease.It’s existed since 2014, but has punctured the public consciousness recently thanks to a ceaseless torrent of cringe-hunting videos made by outsider YouTubers who gatecrash VRChat with the express intent of finding and exploiting weirdos. Furries having e-sex. Military-service roleplayers. Age regressors. Groomers, cuddle puddlers, and performative crash-out merchants. All are considered fair game in the quest for views and revenue. Yet there is one group that enrages the interlopers and rakes in more hate-watches than any other: those who claim they have “phantom sense.”These VR users insist that they physically feel things that happen to them in-game; a mismatch of sensory input comparable to the well-known “rubber hand” illusion1. “People are looking down at VRChat players, saying we’re just a cesspool of mental illness”—Ambzi, phantom-sense haver“It feels like heat, it feels like energy. If somebody gets close to you in-game, you can feel a warm sensation in the areas being touched,” says Ambzi, an autistic femboy from Canada who’s logged 5,000 hours in VRChat. In most other VR games, this kind of proximity might come from dodging heavy gunfire, but in VRChat it tends to come from hugging and head patting. There’s a belief within the community that phantom sense can be developed like a muscle, with more hours in-game resulting in a stronger response—a convenient barrier of entry for the uninitiated that also happens to confer status upon VRChat obsessives. “It was 1,000 hours before I started feeling anything,” Ambzi explains. “I was definitely really skeptical about it. I didn’t think it was a thing at all until I started feeling sensations around my face.“The first time I experienced it I was hanging out with friends who like to be very hands-on. They’d touch my face, give me head pats… They’d move their hands around my eyes and I was like, ‘Woah, this is super intense.’”Ambzi first got into the game during the pandemic, and now says he feels sensations in his face and his arms. He is a dedicated VRChat player, choosing to fall asleep on the game multiple times a week, wired to a setup that cost him thousands of dollars. But if VRChat opens a window to IRL socializing, then bullying, harassment, and verbal abuse must float in on a draught. It’s no understatement to say that those claiming to have phantom sense are loathed by the wider gaming community. Some detest a group they believe has tarnished their favorite virtual hangout spot, while others just can’t bear the levels of cringe.Others just can’t bear the levels of cringeWhether you believe in it or not, the phenomenon is now so notorious that it’s spawned a micro industry of “trainers” offering 1-on-1 sessions to those looking to develop their own phantom-sense capabilities. Kogo, a non-binary 26-year-old from Nevada, is one of them. “People most affected by phantom sense are under the influence of something,” she tells me. “Drinking, smoking, and drugs seem to be a common poison for VRChat users.”Intoxicants aren’t the only vices at play. Where there are people there is sex, and some claim that phantom sense elevates the virtual “intimacy” found in the game’s more shadowy corners. Kogo tells me that this side of VRChat is also a great way to train: “I’ve accidentally triggered my partner’s phantom sense in places that were… NSFW, to say the least.”There are thousands like this. Abe, a 38-year-old 3D artist, says that when playing VRChat he can feel the heat of a virtual fire and smell the needles of a virtual cedar forest. Fenny, a 23-year-old trans girl who moderates a furry server, claims to experience phantom sense all over her avatar’s body. Kovyn, an autistic furry from Illinois, says the agony of a virtual sword slashing into his virtual “torso” stings as if it were actually happening to him.Of all the different forms of phantom sense, the most notorious is phantom pain. It has become a meme in and of itself, immortalized in the phrase “BECAUSE I HAVE PHANTOM PAIN!”—screamed by a VRChat player as he was begging a YouTube troll to stop stabbing his avatar in the eyes. It was this video that first caught the attention of Australian YouTuber Wezy, who tells me about the time he went to a VR furry karaoke bar and threw tomatoes at a performer who pleaded with him to stop because it hurt so much. “I don’t believe it’s real,” he says when I ask why. “Phantom pain comes from when someone is missing a limb. I saw this video where a player walked through someone’s avatar and they started screaming in agony, saying they had phantom pain,” he continues. “And I just thought: ‘What… is… this?’”Since then, Wezy has spent hours lurking in the game. His reasons for doing so might be more understandable than they first appear; VRChat is currently experiencing a gold rush, one offering cringe-content creators the chance to make serious money, so long as they are able to spread footage of their trolling across the viral streaming and social-media ecosystem. He jokes about the ‘VRChat-to-femboy pipeline’ and a widespread associated meme: ‘This game will turn you gay’Josh, who goes by Jonkstrap online, jumps on VRChat once a week for his more than 44,000 YouTube subscribers, and usually finds someone who claims to have phantom pain. “We will try poking them when we are out of vision and they don’t react whatsoever,” he says. “It’s kind of insulting to those who actually have missing limbs and experience the legitimate part of this phenomenon.” It’s clear that many of the trolls aren’t kind people. On the more misanthropic side is Devil Duck, who I find in a public world. “I troll a lot, you know. I do weird shit,” he tells me. “One time I ‘raped’ a guy in-game, a guy with phantom sense.” Wexy takes me on a tour of some popular cringe-cruising spots, where we come across an elderly sounding man who implies that he may have killed 15 of his cats. His avatar, a lanky fox, is being baited by a low-level troll, not too dissimilar to my fixer, with loaded questions that are intended to keep him talking for the amusement of an audience. “When it comes to VRChat, you become the cameraman,” Wexy informs me. “You don’t really troll, you ask a question and get led down a rabbit hole until it gets darker and darker.”Wexy estimates that 25 percent of all the players on VRChat are there to cause grief to others, even if they’re just doing it for kicks and not monetizable videos. “I would not play this game unironically,” he insists. “I play this game for content because I can’t stand the people.”Kovyn, an autistic furry from Illinois, says the agony of a virtual ‘sword’ slashing into his virtual ‘torso’ stings as if it were actually happening to himBecause of this, the game’s virtual bars and clubs have had to call in unpaid bouncers, particularly in the worlds mostly inhabited by furries. Stepping into one of the popular Black Cat Bars for the first time, I’m asked for my date of birth by a doorman. Yet since VRChat is free and can be played even without a headset, it feels like they’re fighting a losing battle. I’m fairly sure multiple children get in by simply memorizing when current 18-year-olds were born. Anyone playing without VR gear is an instant red flag, as are those marked with the suspicious “visitor” tag—denoting their newness to the game. The paranoia is palpable and the volunteer staff aren’t afraid to ban anyone over the most minor suspicion they’re there to cause trouble, whether it’s slapping someone’s avatar or refusing to stop throwing virtual fruit around.In many ways, the caution makes sense. As you may have surmised, a chunk of VRChat’s user base is queer, trans, autistic, a furry, or some combination (or sometimes all) of the above. To those people in particular, this place feels genuinely important. Trans Academy, a non-profit providing inclusive virtual environments for the transgender community, has 45,000 VRChat group members. “This game helped me discover my bisexuality,” says Ambzi, who credits VRChat with helping him come out to his homophobic family. He jokes about the “VRChat-to-femboy pipeline” and the widespread meme: “This game will turn you gay.” But even in a place like VRChat, where anyone can find a community, people have their limits. “Boredom,” “mental illness,” and “attention seeking” have all been suggested to me as the real underlying causes of phantom sense, not just by trolls but furries too. There’s a pecking order to phantom sense, and even those who report having felt the occasional twinge roll their eyes at the more extreme ends of the phantom spectrum. Users are also growing tired of feeling embarrassed-by-association when they see the profitable, viral TikTok and YouTube meltdowns. “People are looking down at VRChat players, saying we’re just a cesspool of mental illness and this phantom sense stuff is ridiculous,” Ambzi bemoans, adding that “a lot of people” who occupy the VRChat worlds “are mentally not all there sometimes.” @oneleggedbanditvr I have REAL phantom pain. #furry #amputee #fursona #furryfandom #viral #phantompain #pantomsense #funny #vr #vrchat #fyp ♬ original sound – Bandit There are other gripes. Many point out that the phrase “phantom pain” is at least halfway borrowed from the phantom limb pain experienced by amputees in arms or legs that are no longer there. OneLeggedBandit, a 26-year-old furry from Scotland who lost his leg battling cancer, takes offense at the term’s appropriation, and has even made TikTok PSAs railing against it. “I know what genuine phantom pain and sensation is,” he tells me. “If people knew what it actually felt like, they wouldn’t be deluding themselves into believing they had it.”Still, even Bandit occasionally worries that he might be on the wrong side of history. Perhaps this is what (trolls aside) really unites the players of VRChat: a kind of radical sympathy, a patience for other people’s ideas that goes beyond what you’d find in regular society. In VRChat you can be a fox, a child, a spouse, anything you like. Those who gather in such places, where the wildest fantasies can be indulged—from roleplaying as the dad of a virtual family, to being a steampunk wolf that runs a bar for anal vore fetishists—don’t tend to cast the first stone.“It’s like amputees, decades back,” Bandit muses. “When they first told doctors they could feel limbs that didn’t exist, they got called crazy… So, am I just ignorant for not believing this feeling that so many people consistently say they experience? Or are they truly that delusional?”Footnotes:1 In 2016, scientists in Italy used this “party trick” to fool volunteers into thinking a rubber glove was part of their own body. Their brains confused visual information with sensations of touch produced by the scientists stroking their real middle finger and the middle finger of the lifelike rubber glove simultaneously.Follow George Francis Lee on X @GuhFuhLuhThis feature is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. 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