On User Safety in VR
Trigger / Content warning: Sexual Assault, Sexual Violence, Harassment
While I touched on some of the safety issues (and considerations) of Virtual Reality in my previous post “The Issue with Voice Chat in Social VR”, it’s a topic that merits discussing more than once, and this time I’d like to speak on the potential for features to mitigate this issue via user-centric safety features.
Digital Harassment and Mitigation
For anyone who’s chanced upon some of the more secluded corners of the internet, on niche websites such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, the magnitude and scale of comments ranging from casually offensive to abject hate speech should come as no surprise. Keeping the conversation within the scope of sexism and digital sexual violence, the permeation of casually inflicted harm and harassment across all digital mediums is a tremendous issue, with real-life effects, as exemplified in this tweet from Games Designer Jennifer Scheurle.
When the medium of interaction becomes virtual reality, however, these offenses are magnified, especially due to the “embodied” nature of inhabiting a virtual avatar.
Michelle Cortese and Andrea Zeller, as part of their Code Word series, penned an article describing some of the history of these abuses (and the attempted technological solutions) in VR, propose a set of Safety paradigms different interpersonal zones, adapted from anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s proxemics.
Facebook Horizon’s one-touch remediation immediately transports you into a safe environment where you can navigate safety features at your own pace
One of the most brilliant features they proposed was Facebook Horizon’s remediation tool. A quickly accessible one-touch button teleports you out of a given space to a neutral ‘safe zone’ where you can access more in-depth safety features once removed from the offending situation. Solutions like this strike me as near perfect - accessible, fast, and effective, balancing immediate needs (removal) with more nuanced capability.
Another suggestion I want to touch on - for its applicability across all situations - is their recommendation for granular controls regarding intimate/personal space. Features like “safety bubble” size being set before ever entering VR are a great way to give users preemptive protective measures. As an example of this approach being applied in my own life, both of the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns I am currently a part of required all participants to fill out a “consent checklist” to decide which topics (such as types of horror, fantasy -isms, and gore) were either totally fine, fine through veiled reference, or a complete non-starter. Through this, we were able to construct expectations for a safe environment for everyone involved.
** For those interested in said resources, check out Monte Cook’s Consent in Gaming and Kienna Shaw & Lauren Bryant-Monk’s “TTRPG Safety Toolkit”.