Personal space is as important in VR as it is in the real world
For the last year or so I’ve spent a lot of time in VR. I’ve explored NSFW spaces, and ridden a roller coaster in VR. When I’m not eyes first in PlayStation VR, I’m watching some amazing stories unfold in my Gear VR. While I’m a giant dork, and love spending time in VR, I’m also an outspoken woman and we all need to talk real quick.
See, I’m already aware of what it means to be a woman in America today. I know that it’s mostly unsafe for me to be out after dark, to go to a party and get drunk without friends. I know how many women are attacked out in the world just for existing without catering to the people who are around them.
I shouldn’t have to discuss why personal space is so important for each person in this world. Not in 2016. That’s the thought, right? That understanding why another person doesn’t want you to touch them without consent is pretty damn simple. It isn’t difficult, but for many people it seems to be something that is hard to understand.
So when VR busted back onto the scene with Google Cardboard, I was all about it. All you have to do is take a look at Ready, Player One to see how VR can serve as a place where you can be what you want to be. In VR you don’t have to occupy the same spaces that the societal systems have placed you in since the time of your birth.
That’s exactly why personal space in VR is just so damned important. It’s as important to retain your bodily autonomy when you are using a VR headset to play a game, as it is when you are walking down the street. I’m not sure that I can be much more clear than that.
I wish that we weren’t already dealing with the issues of consent and bodily autonomy already. In many ways, VR is still like the wild west. Developers are pushing the boundaries of what can be done, and what ought to be done. They haven’t hit the limitations of this new technology yet.
Which is why now is the time to talk about these issues. This isn’t something that might happen. It already has.
You may have heard about Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, and the way that abuse against a character was basically baked into the game. If a video game character cringes away and asks you to stop, do you do it? Yes, you bloody well stop. How are we even talking about this?!
This isn’t like pointing the VR gun at your instructor in a shooter and unloading while they speak. Consent, particularly sexual consent but generally as well, is always important. Video games are a shallow reflection of a world made real, they’ve been used to discuss important issues around us and explore themes that we can’t always explore in our day to day lives. Walking the sexual assault line in VR just because you can or just because the digital person in front of you isn’t real is still wrong. A lot of this is on the developer, to anticipate this behavior and ensure the response isn’t what the player wants to do.
But responsibility also falls on the user, which is exactly why personal space and consent are so damn important. You want as realistic an experience as possible, and that means that the social norms that you should be respecting on any street should also be respected with VR. When you start to push that, you reinforce the idea that when a woman says no you should push forward anyway.
It gets worse though. Have you ever played a multiplayer first-person shooter on Xbox Live? Have you listened to the trolls as they tell you they’ll rape you, or SWAT you, or find you and make you hurt? It is terrifying. I would know, I’ve heard all of those things as a woman who dares to shoot things online with other people.
This is the story of a woman who was groped while playing a multiplayer VR game. It was the person she was playing with who figured that because she was a woman, that it was totally cool for him to chase her around between matches and fondle her chest and genital areas.
It doesn’t matter that she couldn’t actually feel what was being done to her. This is still assault, and pretending it is anything else is bullshit. Yeah, I said bullshit.
If we want an open and amazing VR that anyone can enjoy, we need to deal with these problems right now. Before we go any further. Before this becomes a systemic issue and we see the VR equivalent of GameGate harassing and terrorizing people.
Each person has the right to set up their own boundaries, and we as humans who share the planet with them should respect that. In fact it’s even easier to respect those boundaries from within VR than it is in the real world. It allows people who might not be able to leave their homes for a variety of reasons to easily interact with other people. It lets folks meet and interact with people they never would have met otherwise.
The boundaries that people set up around them dictate how they deal with the world at large. It doesn’t really matter what the boundaries that have been set up are, because they’re there to help protect the people around them. They also exist to make life easier for the people around the boundary setters. If I know I’m going to yell at someone if they surprise me, doesn’t it make sense that I’d set myself up so that exact thing doesn’t happen?
When we push at societal norms, there are some lines that just don’t need to be crossed. We see enough of that in the real world. Why not show us the beauty of a world that we might never be able to visit, rather than pretending that consent from a character is just a dialog option that can be skipped. These are important concepts that need to be respected no matter where you are, and that includes the many facets of VR.
Trolls can be as apparent in VR as they are on a forum, which can be problematic. Thankfully there are already VR apps building in ways to deal with people who invade your personal space in VR, so that it doesn’t continue to happen. Respecting one another within VR might translate to that respect being upheld in our normal day to day lives as well.
I’m not insinuating that video games cause violence or any other nonsense like that. But they can help normalize some behavior that wouldn’t be acceptable in the real world. For the most part it’s easy to draw the line between fantasy and reality, but VR blurs that line by making everything as immersive as possible.
In that kind of immersive experience, where everything is meant to be as real as possible, it’s more important than ever to stop when someone says no. It isn’t a little thing, and I cannot emphasize that strongly enough. I’m sure I’ll see plenty of things that push the line, or pretend it doesn’t exist and when that happens you can expect me to be yelling about it. In the meantime I’ll be keeping an eye on VR in the hopes that we can enjoy adult entertainment and games that respect the personal space of the people and characters within it, side by side.
