Murder is illegal. It shouldn’t be illegal in virtual reality, too.
Ideology and propaganda from the media strikes again!
You start by gingerly probing the playspace ahead of you in hopes of not hitting your desk. Or a wall. Or your overly-expensive set-up required to be able to render the frames fast enough to fool your brain into thinking you’re actually inside a video game. You’re effectively a blind Human thanks to an oversized headset strapped to your face, streaming a crude, low-resolution, real-time motion picture approximation of a floating pair of transparent game controllers used to represent your hands (minus the hands) — or a pair of spheres, picking up the knife, or reaching for the neck of a broken-off bottle. The ghost-façades of your controllers clip and jiggle weightlessly through the geometry of the objects before you instinctively press one of the buttons on one (or both) of the controllers you’re holding. The controllers don’t increase in mass. You effortlessly shake the bottle/knife through the air as if it were made of air. Then comes the lunge and wrestle, the complete lack of physical strain as your victim’s various body-parts intersects with your floating viewpoint. Amidst not feeling any physical presence or warmth, you now occupy the same location in virtual space. Now the victim is mostly transparent as everything in a video game is made of empty shells that lack any form of texture mapping on the internals to save processing overhead, and the game freezes in the final moments.
Science-fiction writers have fantasised about virtual reality (VR) for decades. Now it is here — but in a crude, limited and extremely clunky form where we’re taking the same basic principles that have been established for decades. We observe the virtual worlds of video games with a screen that is now strapped to your face — cutting you off from reality. Thankfully the head and positional tracking means you can roughly orient yourself in virtual space and not fall on your very real and very dumb ass the moment you cut out the real world. The limitations are still great, however, as until Matrix-like perfection arrives where you literally plug into external hardware, and raw data is fed to you directly, bypassing your senses, you will still be constrained to the playable spaces of your room — or building depending on how much money you can spend to scale the abilities of this technology.
This relatively old form of entertainment isn’t dangerous. It has been a tried-and-tested (and often failed) piece of technology that has been around for the greater part of a decade now, and it’s still taking baby steps because for all the technological advancements we had over the past couple of decades, we still have hilariously underdeveloped computational abilities compared to the science-fiction and fantasy films of the 90’s predicting fully-sentient artificial intelligence-packed robots by the late 2000’s. The impact has been questioned, carefully studied, and controlled with age restrictions. There is fundamentally no difference between killing someone in a game that isn’t VR-based and a game that is VR-based as we are still internalising the act, but due to our ability to be rational (at least some of us, anyway), murder in VR shouldn’t be made illegal as it’s not comparable to murder in the real world.
This is the argument of someone with a brain. As someone who has observed and consumed media, I am acutely aware that the craft of propaganda made to fear-monger and spread alarmist, extremist bullshit is all about maximising the impact on the audience. Faux-journalists and editorialists write specific words, bloating their pseudo-science with opinions, all in the pursuit of the right message and ideology.
So I understand the appeal of VR, and its potential to make a story all the more real for the viewer. But we must collectively untwist our underwear over something that is hilariously restricted due to the limitations of technology. Murder and violence is popular in drama, while first (not “single” — FPS games aren’t called “SFS” games) person shooters are one of the most popular segments of the games industry — if that’s all that you care about as there are whole other genres such as city builders, completely peaceful story-driven based observational storytelling interactive films and puzzle games.
The effects of all this virtual gore is clear-cut; Games are used as scapegoats to violence in the real world while no peer-reviewed studies from reputable sources have found any conclusive non-contradicted correlation or link to games causing violence or even sexism that hasn’t already been debunked or refuted due to lacking any evidence that said studies ever happened in the first place (read: Brad Bushman and the AAP “study” of violent video games “boosting” antisocial behaviour — which was proven false, and that it never actually happened).
While, true, games do affect us, it’s often discussed what the negative aspects do. Mental health, mental plasticity and retaining the capacity to think and solve puzzles as we age have all been highlighted as various positives as well — but have been largely ignored by the media at large as only bad news sells. We’re almost hard-wired to react more strongly to negative things more so than positive things thanks to how the news media manipulates and controls our perception on reality, the things that we enjoy, and the things that we consume. What is certain, however, is that it’s not hard to see that providing a frustration outlet that isn’t fraught with real-world risk is much better than what we had in the pre-video games years.
Humans are embodied beings, which means that the way we think, feel, perceive, and behave is bound up with the fact that we exist as part of and within our bodies. Thankfully we are also capable of discerning what is real and what is not — even if VR can increase our identification with the character we’re playing. So even though we recoil when a mallet slams down on a fake appendage (read: The “rubber hand illusion”), we know it’s a fake appendage, or that we’re currently inside a fake, virtual reality.
It’s a huge, impossibly complex step from here to truly inhabiting the body of another person in VR. For true, 1:1 simulation of a lifelike reality to be simulated, again, the technology used must completely bypass your senses and send raw data to your brain by way of a perfectly-tuned neural net. Until we can display a perfectly clear binocular image by sending signals to the brain, we are far, far away from ever hoping to even come close to truly copying The Matrix — minus “the body cannot live without the mind” nonsense philosophical attempt at rationalising why Neo somehow begins coughing up blood that somehow materialises in the real world when he gets shot.
In our current VR-landscape, what will it be like to kill? Surely an underwhelming, buggy, objects-clipping-through-other-objects mess. But don’t think that this creates killers, that we risk making violence more tantalising, training ourselves in cruelty and normalising aggression. The possibility of staging virtual, fake events is exciting for all — but as someone who games, I’m not worrying. We studied the psychological impacts, considered the moral and legal implications, and we have installed age ratings and other restrictions. Virtual reality promises to expand the range of forms we can roughly partake in with a ghost-like presence. But we can’t currently physically feel anything with our minds. Until we all understand that video games aren’t the work of the devil, we should laugh at people who claim “virtual murder should be illegal”.
This article parodies a piece originally published by “Aeon”, a propaganda-oriented rag. You can read their garbage at: http://archive.is/bjSQ1
