My First Virtual Reality Groping
medium.com
medium.com
Who the fuck thinks that?
Remember people, it's completely within your power to switch the game off at any moment! I guess "I disconnected from a multiplayer game because it was filled with jerks" article just doesn't get the same number of clicks as "I was virtually groped in a misogynistic rape fest!"
But, your honour, I was so traumatised I just couldn't click exit!
Are you happy with VR games being boys-only? Is that the VR market you want?
I'm sorry you feel bad. I'm sorry the world has bad people in it. How do you propose we deal with a world that contains such people? Do you think things like 'raising awareness' or writing blogs about it is going to stop the trolls from behaving like this? Because it hasn't worked so far.
If you build a system that doesn't deal with spam, it gets drowned in spam. If you build a system that doesn't deal with abuse, abuse becomes commonplace. If you don't secure your IoT devices you get journalists DDoSed by lightbulbs. It's the same kind of social responsibility.
This means considering "personal space" in the design of games, providing adequate block/mute/etc tools to enable users to deal with offenders without having to quit, and possibly having staff review abuse reports and ban users.
Maybe we'll finally see an end to the boring, tired and endless repetitive rehash of Murder Simulator 3000.
And that's why raising awareness matters.
"I’d had enough. With a final parting obscenity, I yanked the headset off my face"
She's probably never coming back, and her article is going to discourage many women and some men from also ever trying it.
Perhaps she's just one of those crazy people who think that just because one can stop playing multiplayer games doesn't mean it is perfectly okay to be a massive jerk to other players.
That's pretty much the norm, the cold hard reality is that online games is pretty much the land where trolls come from. Play any game where random people play together and you are bound to land on one that someone is doing something to annoy the crap out of the other players. It is the norm, and most people just quit.
I watch my boys play a game where you can end up killing team members from friendly fire and it never fails that at some point, someone joins that makes it their mission to hunt their team and kill them just to P.O. everyone in the game. I think it would be a far stretch to complain that one is a victim of virtual murder due to this. Rather it is a troll doing what trolls do. She should have done what everyone else does, drop from that game and join a different one, with other players.
In the real world, when someone is groped, they can't just press a button and vanish. If they could, they would! And because they can't, they are abused against their will, and as such, it is a crime.
You know, it's not a human right to be able to play online games. I don't remember anything in the UN charter about the right to only be exposed to nice people when in VR. I don't play online, multiplayer games. They are complete cess-pits. But I don't have to play them. I can just choose not to play them. And so I do. And I'm not gonna start now just because "OMG! It's in VR."
She exited the game. Good for her. She has the power! Like the message in the movie Wargames: The only winning move is not to play.