Producing intimacy in virtual reality

Contextualizing digitally mediated intimacy

Contemporary virtual reality – exemplified by the Oculus device featured in this study – reflects the convergence of multiple distinct media and platforms to include online communities, computers, smartphones, and games. I position this study of VR intimacies as building upon and extending this scholarship. I draw from the areas of critical virtual studies (Egliston and Carter, 2022a, 2022b; Evans, 2018; Harley, 2024; Harley et al., 2021), online communities (Boellstorff, 2008; Boostrom, 2008; Dibbell, 1998; Pearce and Artemesia, 2009), online intimacy (Boyd, 2010; Paasonen, 2015; Turkle, 2011), and gaming intimacies (Nardi and Harris, 2006; Pace and Faulkner, 2010; Pearce and Artemesia, 2009; Philips, 2010; Sundén, 2012; Taylor, 2004). A valuable insight emerging from these conversations is that intimacy and the politics of technology are deeply interwoven.

Performing analytic autoethnography in virtual reality

This research first began in February 2022, when my partner and I had our first date in VR. During this date, I realized that sharing my experience might offer valuable insights to the fields of media studies and communication. I had only a vague idea of what those insights might be. I associated the experience with existing accounts about virtual communities (Dibbell, 1998; Taylor, 2002) and digital intimacies (Hobbs et al., 2017; Koch and Miles, 2021; Ley and Rambukkana, 2021; McGlotten, 2013), interpreting VR as a technological update to earlier means for producing intimacy in digital spaces. I also considered the material relations that produced my VR experience. I romanticized the network of cables, wires, towers, and data centers that cohered to allow my partner and me to remain connected while apart. I also thought through practical concerns related to the privacy practices and storage of my personal data. I offer this context to establish that my research questions and sensemaking processes emerged alongside the research process for this article, rather than before (Lindlof and Taylor, 2017; Creswell and Poth, 2016). Further, my positionality as a media studies and communication scholar shaped my interpretation of the experience as a form of data.

To gather data, I recorded entries in a digital (Microsoft Word) journal over a period of 1 year. The recording of entries began after my first VR date in February 2022 and concluded in February 2023. To support the development of these entries, I drew from conversations occurring face-to-face, over phone call, and via text message about my partner’s and my impressions of the VR dates. I received my partner’s consent, during our first VR date, to use our experiences for the purposes of research. I also invited him to comment on drafts throughout the writing process.

I documented our dates across eleven journal entries, engaging ‘thick description’ in my accounts (Geertz, 1973). Specifically, each entry included descriptions about the activities, conversation themes, emotions before and after each date, meta-commentary about the role of VR in facilitating the date, and the length of the date. I also wrote eight supplemental entries, reflecting on the role of VR in our relationship. These supplemental entries emerged from a desire to engage sensemaking alongside documenting the dates themselves. They featured interpretation of my experience and connected my insights to theoretical concepts. The VR dates varied in frequency, due to the demands of our work and personal life. We scheduled most dates on weekend evenings to allow the most time to interact. Each date lasted approximately two-to-three hours. Our dates primarily consisted of conversing with one another, playing multiplayer games, and watching movies. We unintentionally developed a routine of beginning all dates with unstructured conversation, before deciding on what activity to do. Activities were often chosen based on our desired-level of mental and physical engagement for the evening. On some occasions, we would jump from one activity to the next, as our desires and energy levels changed. On other occasions, we would engage parallel play – each immersed within a separate game of our choosing, while talking to the other. Dates often ended due to low battery life on one or both of our headsets or because an activity had concluded.

Following the year-long period of data collection, I engaged thematic analysis of the journal entries, coding for emergent themes related to the production and maintenance of intimacy as well as the mediating role of Virtual Reality (Maguire and Delahunt, 2017). From this process, the following inter-related themes emerged: (1) the affective experiences of VR intimacy, (2) the material production of VR intimacy, and (3) the politics of VR intimacy. I use these themes to structure the accounts that follow.

Since both intimacy and VR experiences are highly individualized and to some extent ‘cut off’ from the physical setting, it is important that we also individualize the sensemaking and interpretive processes of those experiences. Autoethnography enables individualized sensemaking and interpretative processes, particularly with regard to those ‘moments of everyday experience that cannot be captured through more traditional research methods...allowing what we see, hear, think and feel to become part of the field’ (Adams et al., 2017: 4). It involves writing about one’s experiences as a mode of inquiry, and it takes the product of that inquiry as a valid form of knowledge. Autoethnography emerges out of autobiographical and ethnographic traditions (Adams et al., 2017; Ellis, 1999; Ellis et al., 2011; Lapadat, 2017). It has been applied to study digital spaces, such as virtual communities, gaming communities, and virtual reality (Brown, 2015; Foxman, 2018; Sundén, 2012). Specifically, Foxman (2018) found that autoethnography allowed greater access to intimacies and ‘visceral experience’ when studying VR, compared to more traditional methodologies (p. 65).

Many autoethnographies, known as evocative autoethnographies, meaningfully eschew the protocols of traditional social scientific research to allow new voices and perspectives to emerge. My work is driven by a different imperative. I seek to contribute to conversations occurring in communication and media studies at the intersections of digitally mediated intimacy, materiality, and platform politics. As such, I hesitate to make use of the evocative autoethnographic method and potentially dilute those voices and perspective that emerge through it. Instead, I engage a form of autoethnography developed by Anderson (2006), known as analytic autoethnography. This approach encourages reflexivity about the researcher’s positionality and a concern for the generalizability of the research findings. It requires being ‘(1) a full member in the research group or setting, (2) visible as such a member in the researcher’s published texts, [and] (3) committed to an analytic research agenda focused on improving theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena’ (p. 375). Importantly, some scholars such as Ellis and Bochner (2006) and Pace (2012) have suggested that the adoption of analytic autoethnography could make it more difficult for evocative autoethnographers to publish, since it alters understandings of what autoethnography is or should be. I argue that evocative and analytic autoethnographies can coexist, provided that researchers are clear about which approach they are using as well as their reasons for doing so. In my case, analytic autoethnography allows me to demonstrate how my personal and scholarly commitments have intersected to shape my experiences in VR and processes for interpreting those experiences. I now turn to examine those experiences.

Intimate-affective experiences in VR

The initial idea for interacting in VR was my partner’s. I was a reluctant adopter. Some of my reluctance stemmed from my previous experiences of VR. While I enjoyed the novelty, I did not enjoy the experience. The virtual space felt disorienting. The handheld controllers felt unnatural. Most of all, I had the sense that I was ‘bad’ at VR, having failed at most of the activities I had tried before. As with most new technologies, VR has a learning curve that requires ongoing engagement to achieve mastery. This learning curve includes understanding the physical features of the hardware, developing familiarity with the input mechanisms and interface, and adapting to VR-assisted spatial awareness. My initial perceived failures with regard to these skills made me reluctant to try again.

As such, when my partner first suggested bringing his headset over for a date in November 2021, I rejected the idea. It was only months later, when I was visiting him after his move, that he introduced the idea once more. I was more willing this time because I wanted to show interest in the things he enjoyed. That evening, we played rounds of games, like Beat Saber and Superhot VR. We screencast the gameplay onto his television to make things feel more inclusive while the other was in the headset. Still, I was not sure that I liked VR. These feelings arose for a number of reasons: My rounds were noticeably shorter than his because I kept losing the games. Moreover, we could talk only in-between turns, when the headset was removed. I spent most of the evening watching him play, and I felt bored. While game studies scholarship has suggested that collocated, collaborative gameplay sometimes contributes to bonding and in-game benefits to players (Evans et al., 2018), this was not my initial experience. In addition to boredom, I felt self-conscious as I flailed about his living room to perform in-game actions. The inability to see his reactions to my movements contributed to these feelings.

Still, when he later suggested that I purchase a headset so that we could play together, while apart, I was eager. I had the sense that I would enjoy VR more, if we could play simultaneously and if I gained mastery of the input / interface. Over the course of the VR dates that followed, the convergence of sound, imagery, interaction, and shared (digital) space contributed to feelings of closeness. These sensory experiences were comparable to those experienced in person. At one point, my partner text messaged me to say, ‘I think there’s definitely some merit to Oculus dates. I’d say equally as intimate as FaceTime [video call] but also interactive’. Likewise, in the Oculus, I noted ‘Wow, your voice sounds so clear in here’ to which he responded ‘Yeah, it’s like you’re whispering in my ear’. These reflective moments first led me to question and attempt to understand the affective quality of VR for producing and maintaining intimacy.

To do so is not as simple as taking account of emotions. While the terms emotion and affect may sometimes be conflated, affect refers to those embodied, interior responses which might be elicited through interaction with a medium (Bollmer, 2023). Still, affect possesses certain qualities that elude reliable articulation or measurement. As such, there are necessary limitations to my descriptions. I acknowledge these limitations as I describe how the construction of the experience – from the materiality of the connection to the production of an immersive digital space – produced and, at times, disrupted feelings of intimacy. Moreover, I recognize that ‘Intimacy is not itself a form of affect; rather it is more like affect's own immanence…Affect happens in and through intimacy’ (McGlotten, 2013: 8–9). It also emerges from it. The two coproduce one another.

Affective experience occurs through rendering the unfamiliar technological object (the VR headset) familiar by emplacing it with the capacity to extend one’s intimacies and by suspending disbelief as one’s perceptual capacities become reconfigured by the digital. Part of this experience is an involuntary, cognitive phenomenon. VR, like other media, work with and press against the limits of human perception, actively constructing reality through the auditory, visual, and tactile field (Crary, 1990). Through this construction, VR produces immersion and presence – that is, a sense of ‘being there’ (Heater, 1992; Slater and Usoh, 1994) and of believing that one is there (Slater, 2018: 432). To feel immersed and present is not just a voluntary response or a ‘giving into’ the aural-ocular-tactile illusion. Instead, the illusion acts upon the VR user. An early encounter that I had in a VR simulation, known as Richie’s Plank Experience, demonstrates this well. During this encounter, affective response was at odds with rational thought. The simulation prompted me to exit a skyscraper building, walk out onto a ledge and leap from it. I knew that the simulation was not real in the sense that I could not be physically harmed by leaping from the ledge. Yet, as I proceeded forward, my knees buckled and tears began to stream from my eyes. I reassured myself repeatedly that I was safe. However, I could only compel myself to leap by closing my eyes, effectively disrupting the sense of immersion and presence. Seemingly, this encounter demonstrates that what counts as real in the virtual space is the capacity to produce affective response. ²

Intimacy extends out of this capacity while at the same time enabling it. I actively chose the Oculus VR as the medium through which I would communicate with my partner (from a limited number of available VR platforms and, of course, other media). I also had to work to develop and maintain the VR connection. This included charging the headset in advance, coordinating a meet-up time with my partner through other communicative media, and managing Wi-Fi connectivity. At the same time, the VR hardware and interface acted upon me. The headset excised my vision and reduced my hearing within the physical environment, so that I could attend to the digitally produced one. There were exceptions to this. My dog, Achilles, would often paw at me to demand my attention. Likewise, I would occasionally bump into things not registered in the spatial boundary I inscribed for safe play. Typically, though, I could achieve a full, but temporary sense of presence in the VR environment. Once in the headset, the visual, aural, and interactive elements blended together, producing an intimate-affective response. Of course, the same could be said about other communication media, but there was something uniquely intimate about VR. My partner’s body was represented by an avatar that occupied a shared space with mine. I could also identify his avatar’s position, in relation to mine, because the Oculus headset is embedded with spatial audio.

Still, there was often a longing to feel touch – perhaps a haptic response to assure myself that he (his avatar) was there. One evening I wrote about the fruitlessness of trying to physically interact with his avatar: ‘I position myself closer – attempting to touch – but when I do, he becomes invisible to me. I hate it’. The issue was encoded into VR interface, presumably to avoid avatars from standing on top of one another. However, I deeply desired proximity and a haptic response to confirm his presence. The ability to be proximal to, but not digitally touching my partner reinforced some of the physical and emotional distance I was already feeling. It also shaped my actions while in the environment. I had to learn the affordances of each app, so that I could achieve interaction with him. For instance, while watching a movie in the BigScreen Beta app, I could throw popcorn at him from another seat. While playing Walkabout Mini Golf, I could position my avatar in front of his, menacingly blocking his view of the hole. This ability to share space and interact in these ways did promote some feelings of intimacy in a manner similar to face-to-face encounters. However, they also left me desiring more from our encounters.

I was often conscious of the limitations in physical and social fidelity ³ within the virtual environment, as well (Lukosch et al., 2019). Our avatars poorly reflected the appearance and gestures of our actual bodies. Our avatars were constructed from limited design choices. Gestural expressions were limited to head movements, like nodding, and hand movements, like waving. There were moments when we would try to intuit emotions from these limited expressions. For example, when I lost a game of ping-pong in Eleven Table Tennis, he could read my frustration because my (avatar’s) head was tilted up. I also, quite immaturely, began hitting ping-pong balls wildly across the virtual room we were occupying. I most likely would not have done that latter action if he and I were playing ping-pong face-to-face. Yet, in VR, exaggerated responses are one way to make up for the loss of some visual cues. This follows the basic premise of cues filtered out theory (Sproull et al., 1991), which suggests that users must continuously compensate for the lack of physical and social cues in digitally mediated environments. Nevertheless, I argue that some intimacy was built through these acts of compensation, as we worked to overcome the perceived deficiencies that shaped our interaction.

At the same time, these limitations allowed for masking. During one particular date, my partner said something that upset me. Rather than address it, I continued on with gameplay as if nothing had happened. I could feel my face flush red and my jaw tense with anger, but aside from slight shift in tone, my partner likely had no insight into my emotional state. Presumably, my avatar continued smiling – enabling a digital form of ‘masking’. On another occasion of frustration, I simply shut off my headset – the Virtual Reality equivalent of hanging up the phone. He texted moments later, ‘where’d you go?’ to which I lied, ‘power outage. Wi-Fi is down’. The physical distance gave me psychological space to process through my feelings without reacting in haste. Yet, later, in a reflective journal entry, I questioned if and how I would be able to productively handle conflict in face-to-face encounters. Of course, these masking and avoidant behaviors occur face-to-face and with other mediated interactions, too. We just have not yet developed the literacies to read tone and to develop social rules in VR in the same way we might with other contexts.

Materialities of VR intimacy

Another factor shaping our experiences resulted from the fact that digital intimacy can be a precarious achievement, resulting from the materialities of mediation. Specifically, feelings of intimacy were often disrupted by technological failure, such as one evening when slow internet speeds caused a lag in our conversation. My partner, at this time, joked about me having ‘Walmart Internet’, a derisive comment that hinged on a cultural understanding of Walmart being of low-quality, rather than Walmart actually being an internet service provider. In actuality, the slow internet speeds were likely caused by infrastructural factors, like overloaded networks or servers. The production of a VR experience is a time-critical operation, contingent on the coordination of data flows across physical space. Even though my partner and I both occupied multiple privileges centered on place, infrastructural access, technological access, and technological literacies, we still had to actively work to maintain our networked and, in turn, intimate connection.

The precarity of our connection also resulted from material constraints of the hardware. I often found myself ‘watching’ the battery drain on the wireless headsets, interpreting the battery percentage as an estimation of how much longer our encounter would last. As part of our play routine, we had to regularly schedule breaks to allow our headsets to recharge. On more than one occasion, I fell asleep during the scheduled recharging breaks. I would awake hours later to annoyed text messages like ‘ready to hop back in?’ and ‘did you fall asleep again?’ which filled me with shame at my social faux pas. We adopted a number of solutions to try to contend with the Oculus’ relatively short 1.5 h battery life. My partner bought a battery pack for his headset. I used an extension cable, creating a makeshift ‘wired’ connection to my power outlet. These solutions extended our talk-time but also disrupted our sense of shared presence. His battery pack did not always last very long. Likewise, the extension cable I used was heavy. I would strap the cable into the waistline of my pants, so the weight of it would not pull out the power cable. On more than one occasion, I tripped over the extension cable, ripping the charger from my headset. I would have to remove my headset and plug it in once more to fix the issue. This remedy was a regular disruption to my sense of immersion and presence.

More still, as the year passed, both of our headsets seemed to stop functioning as they previously had. We were prompted with several software and app updates. Following those updates, some apps stopped loading and other apps intermittently demonstrated visual lag. The visual lag was particularly problematic for me, as it created cybersickness – a feeling akin to motion sickness that occurs with the use of screens. Cybersickness appears more commonly in female VR users (Stanney and Hale, 2016), which functioned as a subtle reminder to me that I was not the intended user. On two occasions, we called the VR date off and resorted to watching a movie together while on the phone. It was still a shared activity, but felt like a compromise compared to sensory-rich experience of a VR date. My partner and I speculated that these issues reflected a planned obsolescence ⁴ of the Oculus Meta 2 headset, particularly given that the emergence of these issues coincided with the October 2022 release of the Oculus Meta Quest Pro. However, these issues could have reflected functional obsolescence ⁵ instead. As VR experiences become more data rich, they can put strain on a device’s processor. In addition, these data rich experiences can put strain on network bandwidth and cloud servers for computational processing. Regardless of the actual reason for the gradual deterioration of our VR dates, these examples indicate how materialities, beyond the user’s control, can impact on intimacies. Through this experience, it became apparent that the same material relations that had once allowed us to connect now contributed to moments of disconnection.

Of course, the idea that the materialities shape intimacy is not new. Love letters sent through the postal service, dates in the text-based MUDs, and online dating apps demonstrate how the materiality of a medium might contribute to the production of intimacy. Yet, despite the media historical precedent, we do not typically associate the materiality of the medium – including the relations that constitute it – with coproducing intimacy. Increasingly scholars argue that we should (Adler Berg, 2023; Ley and Rambukkana, 2021; Wilson, 2016). This turn towards the material reveals that mediated intimacies are inherently political. The assemblage of platforms, infrastructure, and embedded standards, which produce VR, has a politics that impact users’ experiences.

The politics of VR intimacy

The politics of VR intimacy may impact users in terms of their initial and ongoing access, agency, data privacy, and experiences in VR if and when access is achieved. In my partner’s and my case, our intimate experiences were impacted by concerns related to data privacy and infrastructural control.

My cisgender, heterosexual relationship is accepted as a social norm and is privileged as something I do not need to keep private, per se. However, my partner’s and my dual awareness of the inevitability of data collection and potentiality for data leaks shaped how our encounters in VR unfolded. We openly discussed our concerns about data privacy and skepticism towards Meta’s handling of user data. For example, the awareness of sharing intimate thoughts – whether sexual, controversial, or just simply confidential – in a ‘private’ digital space felt risky given the aforementioned pervasive data collection and the persistence of data leaks. Of course, my partner and I both have high levels of technological literacy as part of our respective professions, so I want to frame this discussion by suggesting that our concerns may not be the norm for other users. Indeed, many users demonstrate a privacy paradox (Chen, 2018), whereby their behaviors do not always align with their privacy attitudes.

To contend with these concerns, my partner and I both engaged multiple, individualized privacy practices. For example, when Meta still required users to have a Facebook account to use the Oculus, my partner – who is an early adulthood, Hispanic male – created a fake Facebook account, at random selecting to be an Asian woman in middle adulthood. He also stylized his Oculus avatar to match this, engaging in what the early VR literature calls as ‘Avibending’ (Bennetsen, 2006). I learned that he did this as a privacy management strategy by teasingly asking him ‘Why is your avatar this way?’. I hoped that my prodding would encourage him to redesign the avatar. It did not. He repeatedly deflected with comments like, ‘What’s wrong with Berta? Why don’t you like her?’ [Berta is the affectionate name he’d given his avatar]. ‘I can’t even look at you’, I responded on more than one occasion. While all avatars reflect varying degrees of abstraction, it felt unusual to direct intimacies at an avatar that did not look like my partner, even when he performed other communicative acts as himself. This privacy maintenance strategy persisted across the various Oculus apps we visited, as well. I found myself relieved when apps would default to highly abstract avatars that only vaguely resembled the human form. It felt more cognitively coherent to assign his verbal communication to a faceless, formless construction than to one that I did not recognize.

While I matched my avatar to my likeness, I too engaged in privacy maintenance strategies. On multiple occasions, I found myself questioning what and how I would say things, due to my awareness of privacy risks. This included avoiding sexually intimate conversations altogether because of my skepticism of the platform. I believe this decision, on my part, is an interesting one. We have engaged in these conversations on the phone and through text message, but those engagements felt less risky. In my case, I felt uncomfortable about the direct link between my Meta (i.e., Facebook, Instagram) accounts and the kinds interactions I would rather keep private. However, it also seems to be the case that I tend to enact more vigilant privacy practices until a platform becomes naturalized as part of my communication repertoire – essentially until it earns my trust.

Still, negotiations around privacy and platform politics are ongoing and may reflect new contingencies, based on factors extrinsic to user practice. For example, in mid-2022, my partner moved yet again to perform work for the U.S. government in several other countries. During the months that he was away, we did not play in the Oculus together. This happened, in part, because of the significant time difference, which made it difficult to coordinate synchronous communication of any kind. It also resulted from the fact that some of his work-related travels prevented him from securely engaging in personal communication. This is because communication infrastructures are inscribed in physical space, reflecting notions of territorial control. As data flows across these infrastructures, they are subject not only to platform surveillance, but also to surveillance by nation-states and other political entities. Such surveillance – and attempts to enact control over infrastructures and data flows – reflect geopolitical struggles over sovereignty. Given these constraints, our communication was intermittent and coordinated around specific times and places. At one point I lamented about the sudden loss of most mediated communication, ‘I am feeling really disconnected…Sometimes you go days without checking in and weeks without calling’ to which he responded, ‘This will be over soon enough. It will be better when we’re in the same country’. In these moments, it became apparent that the material infrastructures that once allowed us to connect had suddenly become a limiting factor to the production and maintenance of intimacy.

During this time, I would still go into the Oculus to play solo, but the virtual spaces that we used to inhabit now felt empty and lonely. The place where we spent the most time – a veranda overlooking an expansive desert canyon [referred to as ‘the home environment’] – at once brought a sense of comfort and connection along with a sense of emptiness. After one night of solo play, I wrote in my journal: ‘Seeing the home environment is a lot like revisiting a place in real life. The textures of the space, the interactions therein are all evocative of memory – that which is left in the absence of what was’. Such reflective moments made it clear how platform and infrastructure had coalesced to produce an intimate-affective experience for me. I had not only developed an intimate connection with my partner, but also to the virtual space we had cohabited together. It was only through disruptions to these oft taken-for-granted intimacies that the politics implicit to their production were revealed.

Conclusion

Given this, I want to conclude by suggesting that the politics of platforms and infrastructures, in this case, also become the politics of digitally mediated intimacy. That is, we shape our intimacies around the affordances, limitations, and power relations at play through their use. As such, we cannot eschew understandings of mediation (and what shapes that mediation) from explanations of the affective experiences that coproduce intimacy. They are entangled and we would do well to generate accounts that contend with these entanglements.

In this article, I have contributed one such account by examining the interconnection of affective experience, materialities, and politics of VR for producing intimacy in my relationship. In particular, sensory input and output converged to produce a shared digital space between me and my relational partner. Within that space, the ability to see, hear, and interact within one another through shared activities co-produced intimacy alongside the content of our communication. Likewise, the content of our communication became shaped around the materialities and politics of the platform. Through these ongoing interactions, our shared virtual space became embedded with social meaning and practices – somewhat domesticated (Baym, 2015) as part of our routine communication.

However, as evident through both our material and social practices, intimate experiences within this shared space were always temporary and required ongoing work to maintain. Our sense of relational intimacy could be either strengthened or weakened by the affordances of the VR interface. For instance, when I relied on limited gestural expression to mask my feelings, I exploited the device’s affordances to produce emotional distance. Yet, for the most part, the VR’s affordances promoted greater feelings of intimacy, despite our geographic distance. How we made use of these affordances were largely within our control. On the other hand, issues like functional limitation, technological failure, and the politics of place all impacted our intimate-affective experience, oftentimes beyond our control. We could develop technological and infrastructural competencies to contend with these issues, such as when I created a makeshift wired connection to prolong my VR headset’s battery life. However, at other times, we were left unsure about how to remedy disruptions to our material connection or how to circumvent concerns related the politics of infrastructure, data, and place.

These disruptions and concerns created a distancing effect that impacted on our intimate-affective experience. To revisit a point made earlier, affective experiences can occur when a user renders a technological object familiar by emplacing it with the capacity to extend their intimacies. We often experienced challenges with maintaining this sense of familiarity, as our practices for interacting in the headset continuously changed to reflect the emergent material contexts and politics of use. Still, this is not inherently a bad thing. Scholarship has suggested that as technologies become naturalized as part of our everyday routines, we become less attune to how power and control are embedded in their use (Datta and Odendaal, 2019; Galloway, 2004; Takayama, 2017). Given this, we might question the extent to which we aim for intimate-affective platforms to become naturalized and taken-for-granted as part of our communication routines.

Future research might provide recommendations for how to carry out intimacy in these environments given these known concerns in this regard. Importantly, some such accounts already exist in relation to antecedent platforms, like early MUDs, social networking sites, and dating apps. We would do well to produce such as accounts with attention to our media histories, which allows us to avoid falling trap to social imaginaries around VR and that provide a critical analytic for understanding new and emerging media practices in relation to older ones. Moreover, additional work needs to be done to understand the ongoing production of a politics in relation to VR and other intimate platforms. Such accounts might productively examine for whom and in what spaces these platforms facilitate intimacy, the agency of users in relation to these platforms, and how experiences differ between users based on aspects of identity. Answers to these questions will be imperative as virtual reality and digital intimate platforms become increasingly common within contemporary cultures.