Sonya Haskins was Hasko7 to the Echo Arena community, a supportive figure who would help people however she could.
These days she’s Head of Programming for the Augmented World Expo, helping organize its latest conference June 15-18 in Long Beach, California. She recently moved to the city after spending much of her life in the southern United States. From purchasing an Oculus Rift in 2017 after a demo at Best Buy to now, she’s transformed almost everything about her life.
She sat for just over an hour for the Good VR Podcast with me using the Riverside podcasting platform. I edited down our talk to just around 52 minutes covering her journey over this time. When Meta killed Echo Arena in 2023, its closure struck a blow to her identity, with her name attached to a place that formed the foundation of a new persona she found in virtual reality.
“When the game started to shut down,” Haskins says on the Good VR Podcast. “I actually was thinking wow, now who am I? Because nobody ever calls me Sonya. I’m divorced now. All my friends are gamers who call me Hasko7.”
In her family it is tradition to purchase one’s own headstone so that loved ones aren’t burdened with the task. She shares over our conversation that she recently bought hers and, when people pass by her stone in the ground one day, they’ll see her name, the dates marking her lifetime, as well as the disk of Echo Arena.
“Echo Arena was a life-changing experience for me,” she says. “I began to meet people outside of my traditional social circle and society that I was used to and met people from around the world, became friends with them, talked with them. It became a community where you would put a headset on and suddenly you’re in this immersive world with a bunch of other robots and you could play these games and be competitive, but it was so much more than that and, to me, Echo Arena is a great example of the beauty of immersive reality, which is you can be somewhere else and do something else and try on different personalities or different looks and different attitudes and see what you want to be in life or what you want to explore, and so that’s what that game was to me - it really gave me the freedom and the permission and the opportunity to be able to say you know is it okay to do something or be something other than a stay-at-home mom.”
The transcript for this podcast is auto-generated.
