We need to take responsibility
At a recent talk at the DevelopVR conference, Andrew Willans, lead designer on EVE: Valkyrie said that VR developers “need to take responsibility for their players”.
He was talking about VR being a much more powerful, and real experience than a traditional computer game or movie. The level of presence created allows us to experience virtual events as real in a way that just isn’t supported by other media. The implication is that something that might be straightforward in another medium might have a profound psychological impact in VR.
Violence
The obvious case is violence in VR.
A lot of VR developers come from the games industry, and a lot of VR content takes the form of games. I love video games, and I am always amazed by the creativity of the games industry. I certainly wouldn’t want to fall into the cheap criticism that says that games are all violent, but there are a lot of violent games around and that is looking like it might transfer over.
Recently I was playing a demo of a shooter in VR (I won’t say which one as I don’t want to single it out). Shooting some one feels very different form shooting some one on screen in a standard first person shooter, in a way that made me feel very uncomfortable.
As I say quite a lot, interacting with a character in VR is very different to interacting with a character on screen. You are standing in front of a life size person, who can make eye contact with and whose body language you can’t help but interpret as if it was a real person. It’s a very powerful experience, you feel as if you are really there with another person.
But it is exactly because the experience is so powerful, that a shooter feels so uncomfortable. I didn’t just feel like I was playing a shooter, fighting an NPC, it was starting to feel like I was really shooting some one.
You are the victim
But that wasn’t actually Andrew’s main point. In a combat game, you aren’t just shooting other people, you can also get shot yourself.
As the experience of virtual reality gets more and more like a real experience. Then the experience of death in a VR game is likely to start feeling less like a gameover screen. Maybe a bit more like. A real death. Being shot, could start to feel like you really are being shot.
I have experienced something a little bit like that twice in VR. Once was in a fantastic game called A Chair in a Room which is a horror game.
I was actually just playing a very simple level where youre just on a boat travelling up a river and nothing really happens. But it is a very ominous experience. The combination of the music the lighting the graphics. Really make you feel as if something bad is about to happen. That isn’t something unusual, I’ve experienced something similar lots of times in films and games, but something weird happened when I was experiencing it in VR.
I suddenly started thinking. “This feels like a scary game but it’s real, this is really going to happen if something bad happens to me. It’s really going to happen to me.”
And then I had to remind myself “No it’s not real it’s just VR”. But just that sense of fear and realism made that such a more scary experience than I’ve almost experience in any other medium. Even though all that happened was travelling down the river on a boat.
Another game of I’ve played and probably many of you have, is called The Climb which is a climbing simulator . Though, on initial play it it seemed like a really great game, and I’m sure it is, I really can’t play that game because it feels too traumatic.
You had to climb up, a mountain. In fact, I never got past the training level which was climbing up a climbing wall. The trouble was when you lost your footing you fell and you had this real sensation you were falling, and that felt really unpleasant. A lot of that I think was nausea. It hits a lot of the buttons that cause simulator sickness. There was a lot of movement without control. But it was also the sense that, even thought, this was a videogame death that felt a lot more real and a lot more frightening. After a couple of rounds I was actually terrified of playing that game. I really felt that I couldn’t carry on. I dreaded falling far too much. More so actually than when I’ve actually been on real climbing walls.
So, there is a responsibility to protect the players from actually potentially quite a traumatic experience of death and being the subject of violence.
Andrew talked about this in terms of EVE Valkyrie. It’s just a spaceship based shooter and Andrews said that they made a very conscious decision to not have combat at the scale of person to person interaction. But they have that level of distance that being in a ship creates. And that to them was one of the ways of slightly protecting a player from the potential danger and trauma that they could actually experience if they are fighting in a VR game now.
I really applaud Andrew and the EVE for really thinking about these issues quite deeply.
Moral Panics
Of course, we’ve heard some of these concerns before about film, television and games. The press is quick to pick up on violence in any new medium and predict dire consequences for children and young people. At the same DevelopVR conference, Catherine Allen in a great talk about Moral Panics.
A moral panic is an inflated scare about new media or technology, whichis often driven by by press concerns and, often, overinflated reporting. Early adopters are generally not affected by more panic, but there is a real risk that people who will be adopting a technology later might be put off by these press concerns. We should be getting ready for a lot of moral panics about virtual reality. If you think about all the panics we’ve heard about violence in games violence and TV violence in films, we’re going to see exactly the same and if not more in VR.
And in a sense we should.
It’s easy to dismiss the over inflated claims of the press and the moral panics that we’ve all heard about games. But these also represent real concerns.
With VR we spend a lot our time saying so much that VR is much more powerful medium than film or TV or games, but that also makes any risks far greater. So if we’re worried about something in a TV or games we should be far more worried about in VR.
We shouldn’t dismiss, the concerns the moral panics. We should think carefully about what they are. We should look at VR as a medium in and think Is this a real danger? And if it is we should be thinking really seriously about how we develop VR and having a real responsibility for the users and others in the types of visa application we develop.
Learning transfer.
One of the best things about virtual reality is how we learn in VR. When we learn something from the book or from watching a video we can pick knowledge up but f we were learning physical skill, it normally doesn’t translate well from a book to the real world. It takes a lot of practice to go from knowing something from a film to actually being able to do it in real life.
One of the great things about VR is that it’s much closer to the real world. And so that we can transfer our learning to the real world much better when we learn something in VR.
That makes virtual reality a really fantastic medium to do education. But it also raises serious worries.
Taking risks.
Learning transfer from VR to the real world can also be potentially really dangerous.
If we’re playing a violent or dangerous VR game. We could be transferring what we learned from that game into our behaviour in real life.
When we’re doing a certain behaviour in VR we may be learning behaviour for the real world as well. So if we are being violent if we are punching people, or even shooting people, in VR there’s a real possibility we’re learning that in real life. I would hope that most of the time and natural moral sense or social obligations will prevent us transferring violence from the virtual to the real world.
But there’s a more subtle risk that Sylvia pointed out to me when we were talking about this. Playing games in VR will typically involve all sorts of risky behaviours. That’s what makes games fun. We we drive at high speeds. We jump off buildings. We run around in traffic and we dodge bullets.
But there is a serious risk that we’ll start learning some behaviours in VR and that transfers over to real life. So when we’re doing something dangerous in VR that we can do fine. I can jump netween two skyscrapers it’s safe and I know that I’m not going to really come to harm.
But the danger comes if I learn that behaviour in VR and transfter it to the real world. I can learn that I’m able to take risks serious physical risks and be fine and without even knowing it, I transfer that behaviour to real life. I’m probably not going to consciously think “oh I can jump between buildings in VR so I must be able to jump between buildings in the real world”. Of course. I wouldn’t think that, but subconsciously I might be learning risky behaviours from VR and without even thinking about it, applying them to the real world. So I might be driving a little bit faster I might think that I can. Running across the road in front of a car faster than I really can or more safely than I can in the real world. That could put my life in very real danger. So this learning transfer of risky behaviours is actually a serious worry and be on something we should be thinking about a lot.
Taking responsibility.
VR is a powerful medium. In VR we do learn things much more deeply than we do in the real world, and that means that we must take responsibility because it can create a danger in the real world. It could make us more violent, in a way that maybe that film of it or games don’t. It could make us more risk taking and put our lives at risk.
I think we need to think carefully about this when we’re making virtual reality we need to take responsibility for our users both in their experience as they play VR, for example, what happens to them when they die in VR. What emotional effects is that going to have on someone.
And also how they transfer on that experience into the real world. Will they learn to take risks that they wouldn’t in real life?
I think we should take these concerns seriously and take responsibility for the impact our VR experiences have on people. We need to make sure we are making a kind of VR that makes us better people. Not more violent people. Not people who put themselves and others at excessive risks. VR is a very powerful medium and we need to think carefully how we use that power.
