Does this surprise anyone?
When developer Aaron Stanton first heard that a woman had been groped while playing his virtual reality game, his heart sank.
The woman, Jordan Belamire, was shooting zombies alongside strangers in QuiVr when another player virtually rubbed her chest and shoved his “hand” toward her virtual crotch.
“Our first response was, ‘Let’s make sure this never happens again,'” Stanton told CNNMoney.
Stanton reached out to me after I wrote about Belamire’s experience on Monday.I received many angry emails in response to my story. I was told I was a feminist who knew nothing about QuiVr; that it was impossible to assault someone in that particular game, or more generally, in the virtual world. I was more than curious to hear what Stanton had to say.
Stanton, whose day job is in software development, told me those attacks were “absolutely incorrect.” What happened to Belamire (a pseudonym) was possible in QuiVr and in other virtual reality games too. It’s up to developers to create controls to make players feel safe inside the world that they’ve brought to life, he said.
On Tuesday afternoon, Stanton and QuiVr creator Jonathan Schenker published an op-ed in Upload VR.
In it, they suggest that developers band together to create a universal “power gesture” to combat harassment in virtual reality, essentially a “safe word” in the form of a motion that would give the player special powers to protect themselves. “We need to offer tools that give players better controls, not simply better ways to hide.”
Kudos to the developers for taking this seriously, and may I suggest that the “special powers” include the ability to pluck the virtual groper’s virtual twig and two berries off and display them as a trophy?
I’m not a gamer; I’ve played a few zombie apocalypse games to placate the teens. I’ve wowed my old grandma by convincing her to experience virtual reality via Google Cardboard. I probably won’t live long enough to see consumer VR resemble the Holodeck on Star Trek TNG.
But if it does, one of the highest and best uses of it would be to give us all an opportunity to walk around in each other’s shoes — to serve as the “ultimate empathy device,” as Sheryl Sandberg said in the linked article. That might be more valuable than building robots that make Mrs. Glenn Reynolds redundant.
planetjanet
Sigh.
kwAwk
While this is inappropriate for sure, it seems weird to call it sexual assault. Immature. Juvenile. Asshoelish. Sure. But can you really sexually assault a computer image?
Pogonip
Well, there’s a 21st century problem for you–virtual groping!
The Other Chuck
New medium, same old behavior, same old notion that a technological solution will work. Saw all this play out on MUDs in the 90’s, and that was just text.
Betty Cracker
@kwAwk: I’d call what’s described above “harassment.”
Mnemosyne
@kwAwk:
What, the ass-kicking you got for your dumbass comments about race wasn’t enough for you?
Sexual assault doesn’t require physical touching. Exposing your genitals to someone without their consent is considered a sexual assault.
? Martin
AI and VR are going to be large-scale moral tests for society. When given permission to virtually grope or to grope an AI creature, would you? Are acts like groping merely damaging to the victim, or are they damaging to ourselves, to the social fabric, to how we view others?
That’s the real fallout from Trump – not so much that he harmed these women (which is certainly bad) but how the acts reflect on the role that women play in society to him. If you are willing to grope a woman, a real woman, a VR woman, an AI woman, they all pretty much lead to the same moral outcome.
That may become a thread that Westworld pulls on as well.
Aimai
@kwAwk: yes. People can be harrassed, stalked, and sexually assaulted online. sATSJAQ-OFF moron posters
Boussinesque
Read the original account the other day and was floored. I’m glad that the developers are taking the issue seriously–this is going to have to be an area of continuous work, as the troglodytic harassers figure out ways to circumvent safeguards that are put in place, or work out entirely new forms of harassment.
I’m always disgusted by the creative lengths these assholes will go to to shame, degrade, and harass other people.
prob50
@kwAwk:
Yeah, as someone who doesn’t do virtual reality games I’m having a problem with calling this a sexual assault. Again, not being a player I have no idea what the image actually looks like. I think I’d maybe go with “sexual harassment” here.
But I would agree that it’s behavior to be discouraged.
gex
These are the so-called good ones, based on their response, yet the idea of making a space safer for women is still an afterthought. Sigh.
Mnemosyne
@gex:
This is going to sound really Pollyanna-ish, but normal guys don’t actually understand how skeevy their fellow males are until you kind of rub their faces in it. The guys who wrote these games would never dream of sexually harassing a woman in VR or in real life, so they didn’t think they would need to try and prevent it.
This is why we need more diversity in the people who are creating and writing the games, not just in who’s playing them. You don’t know what you don’t know.
trnc
Totally on board with this, provided the power can only be activated after an inappropriate grab. Otherwise, the whole game will revolve around said trophies.
Ooh – bonus – every trophy grabbed from the same assailant is more and more atrophied. After 3, the assailant is transgendered and his user name is changed to something like “FlowerGirl” or “HillaryLover55”.
hovercraft
Since I’m not a gamer, I don’t know what to make of this story. I had no idea that that someone could feel personally threatened or violated in the games, but I would apply my real world standard. If it makes the person you are doing it to or saying it to uncomfortable or feel threatened it is inappropriate (usual caveats for people with issues). I would no more call it assault than I would a stalker or weirdo who is sending nasty texts, or leaving scary voice mails. It’s harassment.
Brachiator
@kwAwk:
Yes, if the image is an avatar for an actual person.
@gex:
Some of this may be that geeks simply do not anticipate bad behavior. Consider the Microsoft chatbot that was turned into a vile language spewing hate machine.
Also, too, consensual VR p@rn is coming. One of the stupider things about the Star Trek holodek is that they pretended that people would only use it for “approved” fantasies.
hovercraft
@hovercraft:
I don’t have permission to edit my post, so. Maybe they can create a virtual restraining order like you would get in real life. The players who are abusive could be blocked from interacting with the people they have harassed? Maybe?
Major Major Major Major
Friendly reminder that kwAwk here feels the need to temper conversations about white privilege by pointing out that some white people are poor. And should be ignored like other sea lions.
With that unpleasantry out of the way, it’s no surprise that this has happened/is happening/will happen. As pointed out this is a problem with any multiplayer game/technology. It becomes especially troubling as things get increasingly immersive, real-time, etc. A gesture to protect yourself is one thing I guess. In a lot of games you have a GM who can ban users. But the immersive aspect makes this especially damaging as it’s happening… so a non-instant intervention is less useful. I dunno what one does.
Face
But should it be? Why isn’t that more like just harassment? Otherwise, to lump the physical, psychological, and emotional violence of rape in with exposure as both being defined as “sexual assault” seems to somewhat neuter the meaning and effect of the word “assault”. No?
Walker
This is a real problem, and designers need to be cognizant of this. However, any power you give a player can always be used to exploit something in the game. Which means it is very hard, if not impossible, to have a one-size-fits-all solution.
Kropadope
@kwAwk:
The question of someone who has never played a first person shooter online multiplayer match.
prob50
@Brachiator:
Uh, yeah. I don’t care how supposedly evolved 24th century beings are supposed to be, if you’re dealing with humans there would’ve had to have squadrons of ensigns assigned with “Holodek Sponge Persons” designations and duties.
Aleta
I found this interesting (written by the developers of QuiVr, Aaron Stanton and Jonathan Schenker, linked in the 1st article)
Betty Cracker
@? Martin & @Mnemosyne: Great observations.
Weaselone
@Brachiator:
I’m pretty sure they never assumed that. What exactly do you think was going on in Quark’s holosuites? Even in TNG, several of Barclay’s programs clearly stepped over the line with the use of other’s images.
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: People absolutely don’t consider things like this when they’re designing any system. People who have considerations like ‘friendly AI‘ are a distinct minority within AI research and even systems designed to reduce inequality like sentencing-recommendation software turns out to be super racist.
Mnemosyne
@Face:
Spoken like someone who has never been walking down the street minding her own business when some asshole decided it was time for me to see his dick in public whether I wanted to or not.
Also, from a criminology POV, it’s pretty well known that exposure is often done by someone who is working up his courage to actually grab or rape someone, so it’s recognized and punished as part of that spectrum to try and catch perpetrators before they commit a more serious crime.
Kropadope
@prob50:
If the holodeck can create seemingly solid projections, I see no reason it can’t clean itself.
gex
@Mnemosyne: Which means normal guys aren’t fucking listening to us.
The Other Chuck
@Brachiator:
There were a couple episodes involving inappropriate, er, appropriation of others’ images for pleasure, and DS9 constantly winked at it. Trek’s predictably juvenile-yet-banal treatment of sexuality never really conveyed how creepy that would be. The episode showing the reaction of the real Leah Brahms to her holo-doppleganger was potentially the best writing around the subject, at least up until the writers decided Geordi’s response of “You’re being a total bitch” was reasonable and sufficient to shut her up.
Jeffro
And the GOP continues to grope America, over and over again…
Nothing terribly new or unexpected, but man is it ever irritating. Want us to stay fired up and ready to go, Rs? Just keep running the same old plays…
Needless to say, we can’t let them re-write history on Nov 9th – neither the history of whom they chose to support as their nominee, nor the 4 decades of anti-HRC history. GOTV and then let’s just keep going. Fuck these guys.
Brachiator
@? Martin:
These issues existed long before Trump came along, and will only intensify as we develop and expand AI and VR. By the way, one of the interesting developments in AI and robotics is whether it should be acceptable to create humanoid or “gendered” devices. This gets even as basic as questioning whether Apple’s Siri should have a female voice (and some people who object to this seem unaware of the fact that Siri’s default voice is not female in other countries).
And as always, some of these issues have been dealt with surprising depth on episodes of “Futurama.”
? Martin
@gex:
It’s broader than that. The machine learning community is starting to tackle the problem of using existing datasets to teach computers how to make decisions based on previous patterns of decision-making. The problem is that previous patterns of decision-making are likely biased in any number of ways based on gender, ethnicity, income, etc. and they’re basically training the machines to automate those patterns of discrimination. Just getting the ML community to recognize that they are asking to be in charge of a range of social policies without any training whatsoever in such matters is both illuminating and frustrating. VR/AR is a similarly landmine-fraught environment.
Aleta
@Aleta:
He also says that since the article about this harrasment appeared, they have already changed the Personal Bubble setting so that it provides full body protection against this form of sexual harassment.
He also writes: “Even for me as a passive participant reading the article, I felt that anger and vulnerability carry with me. This highlights for me the potential and dangers of VR itself. The medium should force us to really think about how the sense of “presence” changes interactions that would feel less threatening in a different digital environment.”
p.a.
Even virtual sports.
Mnemosyne
@gex:
No, it means that they need people on the spot to remind them of where their blind spots are. We all have blind spots that we don’t realize are there until someone points them out to us. God knows that plenty of POC and LGBT people on these very boards have taken on the duty of pointing my blind spots out to me when I say something stupid.
Major Major Major Major
@? Martin:
Tell me about it, that was part of my Master’s.
Walker
@? Martin:
Isn’t your IRB board requiring training for ML on that type of data? Ours is.
Redshift
The producers of a multiplayer online game that I worked on a little (that never ended up getting finished) out some thought into harassment, and their solution was that you could just make any other player not exist in your game world. It worked in that structure because it was a game where you gathered a group to play through a story, rather than massively interactive, but I think there are equivalents of the pie filter that could work in a lot of different game structures. It provides immediate relief, and could notify the administrators if a player is getting an excessive number of pie-ings to see if they should be warned and then banned.
Punchy
I understood absolutely zero percent of that. And I think that may be a good thing.
Spider-Dan
I think this is the equivalent of prohibiting rude hand gestures in a war zone.
So if I understand correctly, I can run up to someone, shoot them in the back of the head, and crouch down over their lifeless corpse to “teabag” them while shouting the most racist, misogynistic, and/or homophobic profanities I can think of through voice chat… but if my avatar reaches near their avatar’s naughty bits, I’ve gone too far?
The very concept of sexual assault in a game where the stated objective is VIOLENT MURDER seems out-of-place. I know America doesn’t care how many intestines you splatter as long as we don’t see an exposed nipple, but this is overboard.
prob50
@Kropadope:
Enhanced Voting Techinques
Speaking as a Second Life sim admin for a big sim, articles like this are just a “how to” for griefers. Sitting there complaining about how wronged one was in a news article is like the holy grail for a griefer. Most likely the harasser is on Something Awful or 4/chan patting himself on the back. Ban them, move on like they never existed is the only thing that works. Don’t feed the trolls and all that.
Redshift
@Face: That’s why the law recognizes both assault and “assault and battery.” Physical contact is battery, assault includes threatening behavior without touching.
? Martin
@Walker: Ours is. But what of all of the datasets outside of academia? Which is most datasets, btw. And that training is very much a work in progress. I don’t think we really know the extent to which we are going to codify previous biases, especially when many researchers themselves can’t recognize those biases. The lack of diversity in programming/engineering becomes a real problem here.
Kropadope
@Spider-Dan: You don’t think the teabag isn’t also a sexual assault?
trollhattan
LOVE the graphic, even if his hands are virtually enhanced.
Major Major Major Major
@Enhanced Voting Techinques: Agree on the ban/move on thing. What’s troubling to me is not that griefing is annoying and can really bug the crap out of you, but that we need to start establishing norms around this now, before we get to fully immersive dives and haptic feedback. Once you’ve gone beyond “this is really annoying!” and into something that actually kind of feels like assault, if we don’t have a way to talk about this and a history of effectively dealing with it it’ll be, not too late but we will have a big problem.
Mnemosyne
@Spider-Dan:
Again, I can’t help but notice it’s only men here who think it’s going overboard for women to not want to be sexually harassed while they’re playing a freaking game.
(Edited for being overly broad.)
Let me put it this way: most people, male and female, have never shot someone in the head during wartime. Most women — and more men than you’d think — have been groped or sexually harassed. Why does a fantasy game world have to include that reality?
Brachiator
@Weaselone: RE: One of the stupider things about the Star Trek holodek is that they pretended that people would only use it for “approved” fantasies.
TNG generally assumed Holodeck Disneyland. And Barclay’s mild slap on the wrist simply involved using the crew as part of his fantasies, but did not dare bring up the issue of sexual behavior.
Yep, DS9 was grittier. But even here, Dabo Girls and holo suites were never dealt with in any great detail.
@The Other Chuck:
They also had to clumsily dodge the issue of Geordi coming across like a creepy stalker.
Pogonip
@prob50: Didn’t Quark have a bunch of X-rated games, “Romulan Sex Slave” and whatnot?
Keith P.
@trollhattan: That’s why the babies are always crying.
hovercraft
@Jeffro:
Your link doesn’t work.
But here is something else to savor.
Trump Congratulates Gingrich On ‘Amazing Interview’ With Megyn Kelly
Keep f**king that chicken.
Betty Cracker
@hovercraft: He’s such an idiot. Here’s hoping this proves to be yet another time he stepped on his own pee-pee because it sorta feels like the media is itching to re-horse race this election.
Major Major Major Major
@? Martin:
The ML, data science, AI stuff done in silicon valley (which is what we’re talking about here for the most part) is, in the majority of cases, not done by people with any training or often interest whatsoever in social justice or even machine ethics.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@p.a.:
As Cotton McKnight says about Dodgeball:
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator:
They didn’t assume that–there were actually multiple episodes about people being skeevy in the holodeck and sometimes getting in trouble for it. Also, a definite implication that there was porn in there that was considered OK; where users got into trouble was using the likenesses of real people (what I didn’t consider realistic was that there seemed to be no established regulations or safeguards there).
Kropadope
@hovercraft:
Fixed Jeffro’s link.
prob50
@Pogonip:
Probably, although I would note that Quark, I believe was Ferengi, who were portrayed as considerably more craven than humans. Ferengi’s considered it indecent for a female to even wear any clothing at all.
Hmmn…now that I think about it, doesn’t Donald Trump’s hair kind of stylistically resemble a Ferengi’s head or head-covering?
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Uh, I am a man, and I most vociferously object to the idea that any kind of unwanted action or attention is acceptable in any kind of gaming or virtual world.
Fantasy worlds, including computer gaming, often accommodates consensual sexual behavior, and all kinds of fantasy play that would be unacceptable in the real world.
Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck
@Face:
This would be relevant if it weren’t for context, much in the same way that affirmative action would be discrimination against whites if there weren’t a gigantic discrimination against non-whites to make up for. Here, preventing assault of any kind is such a challenge that arguing fine tuning distracts from the desperate need to combat all of it, period.
@Spider-Dan:
If you can’t tell the difference between a consensual fantasy and nonconsensual harassment, I don’t know what to tell you.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jeffro:
Your link doesn’t work. You need to delete the default http:// from the link box before entering the URL. I wish Alain would just get rid of it. I’ll drop him a note.
In the meantime, fixed (WaPo link).
? Martin
@Major Major Major Major: Yeah, pretty much. I think it’s a HUGE mistake to treat programming as this thing that ‘other people’ do. I know most people in the social sciences went into their field to avoid tasks like coding, but holy fuck people – your entire field is being taken over by people that have close to zero interest in the things you’ve been focused on for the last 100 years.
I know the imminent takeover of the trucking industry is an interesting economic and sociological problem (what do you do with 6 million suddenly out of work truck drivers with no relevant skills for the new jobs created by this technological shift), but the social scientists studying that in a detached way don’t seem to realize that they’re on the list as well – just a bit farther down.
Tom in WI
worst TNG guest star ever
Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck
@? Martin:
That imminent takeover ain’t happening imminently. As the article points out, the system only works if you remove all the complications from driving that make it hard to program a self-driving car. It drives on a straight freeway after the driver handles the merging and watches it in case of emergencies.
Major Major Major Major
@? Martin: I don’t think social science will go the way of trucking any time soon, but the lack of Serious People discussing the implications of the coming (~20 years) wave of automations is very troubling.
I’m more worried about AI researchers that don’t have a grounding in metaethics but that’s a problem much further down the line. In the mean time we really really need to get on what to do about VR.
? Martin
@Brachiator:
And yet most computer gaming is centered on killing people. It’s a little bit curious that we’re sensitive to rape in video games but not wholesale murder. It’s a very confused place. I’m a gamer myself, and it’s as predictable as the morning sun that the first mods for any RPG will be those that take the women’s clothes off. The publisher will let you murder the women in horribly violent and realistic ways, but not see them nekked – that’s a bridge too far.
Bill
I’m not a VR game player. The closest I come is playing online Mario Kart with my kids. So maybe I lack an understanding of how this game works. But why the hell is groping someone even an option in the game? What programmer sat down and said: “You know what this game needs? A hefty dose of sexual assault!”
Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck
@? Martin:
America is bizarrely up-tight about sex, vastly more than about violence, yes. In theory, both should be equally allowable in media, and common because they’re built-in needs that have to be safely channeled instead of pretending they don’t exist.
prob50
I guess one reason I view this as “harassment”rather than assault is that I haven’t played any VR games and have a hard time picturing myself as`actually existing as an person within the game. I would be looking at it as a viewer and find it objectionable but would not feel personally assaulted. I imagine a regular player might feel a much more personal and emotional investment in the actions and activities within the game format.
hovercraft
@Kropadope:
Thanks.
I expect hearings to be called as soon as they get back into session, when’s that the week after the election. The good thing with that is we can all point to that and ask if this is what they were elected for. We have a contentious election for the last two years with the hose investigating everything under the sun, and now they want to spend the next four years doing more of the same. The media is complicit in this, but the public has heard all of this since the BENGHAZI investigations started, and at the end of the day they are voting for her anyway. The problem with telegraphing your punches is that they usually don’t land the way you want them to. The public just wants this election to be over, they will see this endless investigation as a continuation of it, and will hate it. The wikileaks crap shows politicians and their staff doing politics, shocking. The GOP and the media may find it titillating, but no one else does.
Every time Hugh Hewitt goes off on his list of Clinton scandals involving names and things I’ve never heard of I tune out, bringing the fever swamps to America has been tried for 25 years, it doesn’t work.
Kropadope
@Bill: People always find way to take ordinary game controls and use them to mimic sexual assaults. The most well known of these is repeatedly crouching over a fallen enemy to mimic the act of “teabagging” them
Omnes Omnibus
@? Martin:
FFS. I would posit that most people in the social sciences are there because the field interests them. Ascribing it to a way of avoiding coding is silly.
Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck
@Bill:
The programmers didn’t think it was possible. The players found they could use existing motions like grabbing (intended for equipment) or crouching, stuff like that, to mimic sexual harassment actions. People are extremely good at exploiting loopholes to get what they want. That is a constant topic in the gaming industry, for fans and programmers alike, and actually rarely centers on sex, more on finding ways to cheat-win a game or demonstrating hilarious physics bugs.
MattF
@Jeffro: Yes, but… the death throes of the Republican party are going to create an awful mess for everyone. It’s probably going to happen, but I’m not looking forward to it.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Yeah, I went back and edited the original comment because it was too broad a brush: I meant that the people excusing the behavior were all men, not that all men were excusing the behavior. Mea culpa.
Right, but this is why it’s a problem: in a multiplayer game like this, one player’s fantasy play of getting to grope someone is directly affecting another player’s experience of the game. In the past, there has been a social assumption that if women didn’t want to be harassed or assaulted in public, they shouldn’t go out in public, and we’re working through that cultural assumption now. A group gameplay like this is a public space, so why should one player be allowed to harass another player in a way he wouldn’t be allowed to do in a real-life public space?
Major Major Major Major
@Omnes Omnibus: Agreed. Kind of silly to think you’d enter a very difficult-to-enter field to avoid… entering a different industry entirely.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: Yeah. This isn’t a virtual world, it’s a survival game. It has rules. And a central purpose, and a beginning, a middle, and an end. It couldn’t be more clearly defined as a groping-free zone.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Mnemosyne:
Women have asserted their influence in the gaming world, and their viewpoints were so welcomed there’s now a category of snark called “ethics in gaming journalism”.
ETA: I read these articles and think I need to get out more, then I think I need to shut off the computer, stay in and lock all the doors and windows.
Pogonip
@Bill: Such a game would probably sell millions.
? Martin
@Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck: It will happen within 5 years – mark my words. $230B per year is spent in the US on wages for truck drivers alone (that’s about $800 per US citizen as a sort of ‘tax’ on the cost of goods given that the driver doesn’t in any way make those goods better). Plus, trips longer than 10 hours must be delayed by at least 8 hours. An autonomous truck can go coast-to-coast only needing to stop for fuel, not rest. That cuts two days off of delivery times.
Probably the single biggest economic gold nugget out there right now is automating truck driving. And trucking will come earlier than wholly autonomous driving because they can roll it out in phases, with limited routes. They can skip urban driving if need be and focus solely on how to get a intermodal container from a port or factory to specific distribution warehouses. That’s a known route with a limited subset of problems to solve. If they need to add technology to the road to enable that, they will pay for that because the payoff is huge. They will simply expand outward from there.
? Martin
@Major Major Major Major: Not soon, but certainly within the career span of anyone emerging from college with a degree. 30 years? Yeah, I think so.
Major Major Major Major
@? Martin: @Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck: Having a driver sit there and watch for emergencies during the freeway portion doesn’t require paying a driver nearly as much as a long-haul truck driver makes. The cost savings on I-80 through Utah alone would make this feasible.
Betty Cracker
@prob50: That makes sense. I’m not a gamer either, so I’m sure I don’t fully get it. But I know what being stalked and harassed online feels like, and I have been told I can always just turn off the computer or put down the phone or stop giving my opinion online if I don’t want to deal with creeps, so in that sense, I do get it.
Bill
@Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck: I think I just lack an understanding of these games. As a teen – many may years ago – I certain remember making Mario or Pitfall Harry do things that would make a room full of 13 year old boys say: “He look he’s totally whacking off!” But the amount of squinting it took to see the action as actually doing that was ridiculous.
It seem to me you’re describing something that’s unmistakably virtual sexual assault. I’m not understanding how the inclusion of that kind of action couldn’t be intentional.
Omnes Omnibus
@Major Major Major Major: Do airline pilots make less now that autopilots do most of the flying?
Schlemazel
I get that the developers might not have thought about virtual groping but as a security guy i would have suggested anti bad behavior measures.
On this topic irl. There was an incident at an organization I belong to with a guy and his behaviou around women. In discussions the guys in my group had not inkling of a problem but all the women had him pegged as a creep. Are all women forced to develop this 6th sense and are all men blind to it? I thought I was doing ok but guess I have a way to go yet.
Brachiator
@prob50:
I am not a gamer, but have always been interested in how people use computers and stuff, especially for recreation. Including the negative aspects.
I am not a gamer and don’t know all the ins and outs of the world. But I have heard, for example, that there is not just a problem of virtual assault. I have read about women players in multi player games simply being interfered with when their avatars are obviously “female” or when other players know that they are a girl or woman.
And of course, even in blogs, women and nonwhites are often harassed and belittled, ganged up on.
Mary G
@Mnemosyne: This. If you’re saying it’s not a big deal, then you’re a man who’s never had a certain conversation with a woman in his life.
MattF
@? Martin: Just wondering, as someone who drives on the interstates every day… does this mean all the trucks will be driving at the legal speed limit, rather than the, um, actual speed limit?
gvg
I think a persons past might also impact whether it was harassment or assault. It might really push someone over a line if they had say already been raped in the past. I might even unfairly recommend someone with a past issue not play in a VR game.
Could an administrator review the past actions of an accused VR and save evidence for warning and banning? Better if they can prevent it before but quickly after if kept up might also be good. I am guessing they might need to put the ability into the game before the need to use it but I don’t know.
One of the hard things about reality and harassment/assault is the lack of proof and conflicting stories. It leaves us thinking we can’t figure it out so we don’t try. In a computer game, their could be a detailed record and facts could be determined. I think it might be more possible to enforce good behavior but only if we realize it’s not the same as real life.
Schlemazel
On the topic of vr experiences. Back when he was funny, last century, Dennis Miller had a funny bit. It went something like: when guys can go to Blockbuster & rent a program that will let them “make love” to Claudia Shiffert all day it will make crack look lije Oveltine.
JanieM
Gee, if only we could also think of a way to put the intermodal containers off the highways where automobiles drive. Maybe a system of rails or something. ;-)
trollhattan
@Omnes Omnibus: The middle bit, yes. What interstate highways don’t have is an air traffic control equivalent to coordinate vehicles and keep them safely apart.
Les Bonnes Femmes
@? Martin: And Black Mirror, too.
? Martin
@Omnes Omnibus:
Those are not mutually exclusive. We know that the majority of students entering college have ruled out anything in the STEM field, and many of them ruled it out by middle school. The social sciences may be interesting to them, but for many of them they never really considered programming – and we can measure how many social scientists fill GE slots with programming courses (it’s incredibly small). This is particularly true with women. We turn them off of certain STEM fields largely because we treat these as sanitized occupations devoid of social meaning. If your driving force is a paycheck then engineering sports cars may be pretty appealing, but if your driving force is to make a contribution to society, then that’s probably not very interesting – and we know that men and women see college majors at least partially through those different lenses – men for economic opportunity, women for social opportunity. Programming has always been seen as an economic driver but not a social one. With VR and ML, that changes completely. If you want to broadly affect social change, then having your hands in the code is probably one of the best ways to do that over the next few decades and probably forever thereafter.
Major Major Major Major
@Omnes Omnibus: that’s not really equivalent. You can’t modularize out the easy middle part of flying, truckers don’t drive 300 people at a time, etc.
Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck
@Bill:
Easy scenario: Programmer adds an arms-out, scooping motion for picking up items. Asshole player goes up to female player and starts doing that at her breasts.
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan: I would imagine you give them their own lanes.
gex
The thing is, it has been well over a decade since voice modulators came out to protect women who use XBox Live.
GamerGate has been raging for a few years now.
There is constant discussion in the tech/gaming/comic world about these issues.
These devs stated flat out that they didn’t even consider this aspect of their VR. At what point does the fact that this is not a part of the development process reflect badly on them? Or does “oopsies!” excuse this time and time again?
ETA: This is different, if you ask me, than when guys can sort of be mindless about this because it isn’t part of their every day life. Software development is a very regimented process with all kinds of quality controls and they don’t have this as a part of that process.
Gindy51
@? Martin: They’re still going to need a “driver” to fill up the gas tank…
And while I can see the driver less trucks as interesting, organized crime would see them as a bonanza.
Peale
@Gindy51: Or they’ll just limit themselves to driving in New Jersey, where you still get full service.
Spider-Dan
@Mnemosyne: Again, the objective of the game is explicitly violent murder. When that’s the context, having an avatar reach near a person’s crotch or crouch over the head of their corpse seems a minor indiscretion compared to stabbing them in the chest or shooting them in the face (with all the graphic details that accompany such action).
It just seems like a gore-filled first-person-shooter is an inappropriate setting to complain about vaguely-simulated sexual assault. It’s like complaining about oversexualization of women in a slasher flick.
Mnemosyne
@Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck:
This is where we get into that bugaboo of consent, though. I’m sure that, as VR advances, there will be online sex games where consenting adults can interact with each other but, just as IRL, the participants will need to be able to adjust the settings to their comfort level, like no butt stuff or whatever you would say to a partner IRL.
? Martin
@MattF: Absolutely. Over time I expect the HOV lanes would be repurposed for autonomous vehicles. They’ll go exactly the speed limit, vehicles can follow more closely because their reaction times are in milliseconds and they can inter-communicate, and they won’t accordion and slow traffic. They’ll be more effective at reducing congestion than HOVs.
But it has big implications for car design. If your car will never exceed the speed limit and never exceed a certain rate of acceleration or g-load, do any of its performance characteristics matter at all? What’s the point of a 200 HP engine? Why not stick with a 40 HP (electric equivalent) one and take the range/energy savings? In a world of autonomous vehicles, BMW, as they are currently branded has no place. Big, big changes are coming.
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
They kind of have that now with railroads. Reserving lanes for trucks would require adding them since away from cities interstates are but four lanes. Ain’t nobody paying for that, presuming it’s even physically possible.
prob50
@Gindy51:
Naw, you could probably find plenty of out-of-work truck drivers hanging around the fueling stations willing to dispense the fuel for a couple of bucks.
Omnes Omnibus
@? Martin: Well, of course, people tend to choose what they find most interesting and avoid what they do not. As far as the rest goes, that well may be. I just found it silly to suggest the people would get a PhD in anthropology as a way of avoiding learning programming.
? Martin
@Gindy51: Or will truck stops simply go to full-service. Truck drives in, someone fills them up, it leaves and pays virtually. Truck stops go Oregon/New Jersey. One job for every 100 lost on that front.
trollhattan
@Gindy51: If they standardized tractor design they could be filled robotically, like Tesla’s charger robots. What would be hilarious is rolling tankers, like KC135s on wheels, filling them on the go. I’d pay to watch that (from a safe distance). And no intervehicle groping allowed.
Gelfling 545
@hovercraft: I found it amazing; probably not in the way Trump meant, though.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
What? No. This is not true, or is overly broad.
This opens up all kinds of cans of worms. A game world that a person pays for and enters into is not necessarily analogous to a public space. But let me step back. As long as there have been even forums (from the ancient days of The Well, Compuserve, etc), there have been questions about how the space should be moderated, and who has the authority to impose rules and enforce standards of behavior.
But we also see, and blogs (including this one) that even the distancing of the keyboard makes some people feel that they can freely abuse and insult other posters. Exchanges quickly erupt into anger in ways that would probably not happen in the real world. And for various reasons people sometimes feel more free to be assaultive in a virtual world than they would be in the real world.
I have also seen that sometimes men (or other homogeneous groups) feel more free to be combative with each other than women might feel. And this is not to suggest that women are “naturally” more sensitive. Some men online are faster to band together to “punish” a self-identified woman who “protests” or “complains.”
There are also people, men and women, who feel that the virtual world should be a libertarian paradise, with no rules or as few as possible. And it’s just my observation, but sometimes some of these people are simply blind to how people can feel unsafe or under assault when they are online or in a virtual world.
Captain C
@prob50: Or a dedicated ‘transporter’ system.
Pogonip
@gex: Have you read about the Comics Code, instituted in the ’50’s by the comics industry as Congress was breathing down its neck? Maybe something similar for the video game industry?
Spider-Dan
I’d also like to point out that it would be different if players were actually forcibly disrobing other players, preventing them from moving while doing so, or other actions that really do simulate assault… in the way that when you shoot someone in the head in these games, their brains go flying everywhere as if you had actually shot them. But in the case of this scenario, the offender’s hand passes through the other person as if they were a hologram. One of these actions is explicit (and intended), while the other is vaguely implied.
Omnes Omnibus
@Spider-Dan: Yes, in a world where people get murdered and children starve to death (real life), why would a woman be at all concerned about some dude squeezing her tits without her permission, right?
? Martin
@trollhattan:
The new air traffic control system doesn’t have that either. Planes communicate with each other to maintain distance. In fact, autonomous planes are a much easier problem to solve than trucks because there’s better infrastructure in place and the complexity of the problem space is much lower.
catclub
@Bill:
Well, once you can shoot or punch someone else in that VR, sexual assault should not be too far away.
Mnemosyne
@Spider-Dan:
And yet you don’t think that a first person shooter game is inappropriate setting in which to sexually harass someone?
I realize that, as someone with two (2) degrees in film, I probably think about and analyze this stuff WAY more than the average viewer but, yes, sexualizing violence is very problematic. Conflating sex and violence into being the same thing and making violence sexually appealing is how you end up with creepy guys deciding that a gory first person shooter game is an appropriate place to sexually harass the female players.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: Wasn’t there an episode where Jeffrey Coombs guest character wants Kira for his holosuite program.
? Martin
@Gindy51: I doubt it. Autonomous trucks are covered in cameras and lojacked to the 9s. Hijacking a truck was feasible when nobody would notice it missing. If an autonomous truck so much as stopped without the traffic system confirming a problem on the road, alarms would go off, there would be 360 degree video of everything happening.
Organized crime is mostly centered around low-risk crime carried out at large scale. They’d steer clear of trucking because its too risky and pick something else.
? Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: No, you’re completely correct there. That was wrong of me to suggest it.
Captain C
@ Martin: g
He or she brings them to where I can have them. That’s definitely added value over something I can’t use because it’s in New Jersey, or China.
Schlemazel
@catclub:
Anyone remember Leasure Suit Larry?
That can’t be far behind and sadly there will be a market for it
schrodinger's cat
I love reading all the mansplaining going on in this thread. Good work guys. Carry on. I am on to the task of packing box # elebenty.
Brachiator
@? Martin:
But this has always been a challenge as technological change makes some jobs obsolete and creates opportunities for new ones. And it is not necessarily the case that truck drivers have no relevant skills for new jobs created or cannot adapt.
Part of the problem, I think, is that increasingly technological advance is more efficiently and effectively wiping out the primary job but also secondary jobs faster than new jobs can be created.
As an aside, I keep reading how exciting it will be to have driverless cars, which may even make car ownership obsolete. But I wonder where all these millions of cars will be kept when not in use?
Emma
After reading this, I am more convinced that ever that I was completely right when I turned down an invitation to join one of these games. It’s funny (in the cynical through-gritted-teeth way) that women are always told to tailor their reactions to what is acceptable to men. I wonder if I man playing these games would feel the same way if they were programmed to allow rape of males?
ETA: Also, could some of you please stop conflating sex with violence? It’s creepy.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: I have 2 degrees in Physics and I hate coding. For me its a means to an end, not an end in itself. Mr Tom Friedman of BJ aka Martin does not speak for all STEM graduates either.
trollhattan
@? Martin:
Technically feasible today, but we’re unlikely to go pilotless even if all the flight crew has to do is put a foot on the brake and press “Start.” Because shit happens.
Cost savings would be minuscule anyway.
Aleta
Game development is taught at colleges, universities, tech schools etc., so I’d like to see this issue be part of the teaching in the technical classes. (Some students only take an intro class, with the goal of marketing their project right away.)
Not just in separate think-type classes like “computers and society” or “women and computing.” But as part of the topics taught from the start, just like techniques for “how to make shadows move” ; “how to make rain fall according to laws of physics;” “what happens when you drive a car over weird terrain,” “realistic player movement.” Kids look at ways of implementing and then experiment with outcomes.
There’s no end of technical topics to cover in one class, and multi-player stuff might only be touched on in an intro course. But when students are learning how to keep a player’s legs under its body, how to keep a car from driving off a drop in terrain, speaking of other protective settings and the reasons for them is not out of place if a teacher understands the importance.
Engineering classes have a built in premise of safety; the study of traffic control has a built in premise of fairness. The study of building and controlling virtual space that is safe and fair can be similar.
A possible idea: articles about women’s and minority issues in game space can be forwarded to any teachers and departments that list classes with application to gaming, whether in schools of computer programming, visual sciences, digital art, etc. Not all teachers are skilled enough to incorporate these kind of ideas in a matter of fact way into a tech class, but awareness is a start.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
It is historically true that women have been taught that they are responsible for the public behavior of men. It is not taught as overtly anymore, but it is still taught. What did you think the what was she wearing? question was about? It includes the implication that if a woman didn’t want to be assaulted/raped, she shouldn’t have gone out in public or interacted with any men while she was there.
I think part of the problem is that online and gaming spaces are not held to the same standards as IRL public spaces. If a mixed group is playing, say, touch football in a park and one of the guys grabs a woman’s breasts, there will be immediate social and possibly legal consequences. If similar harassment happens online, women are expected to shrug it off.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat: As a total aside, here or elsewhere, do you know anything about the actor Alia Bhatt or a movie called “Dear Zindagi?” A clip of the movie popped up in YouTube. It was kinda charming.
There was also a clip of Priyanka Chopra at some show biz event dancing with John Travolta.
Josie
@schrodinger’s cat: When I was packing to move, it seemed as though each night my belongings would breed and multiply after I had spent the day before packing boxes. This was after I had downsized from a four bedroom house to a two bedroom house. I dread the next (and hopefully last) move. I keep wondering where does all this stuff come from and do I really need it? Just keep thinking of how happy you will be in that new house.
prob50
Re: driverless trucking/(and other upcoming technological advances as well) – Obviously some form of this is in the works for the future. Done right it will almost certainly make the transportation of goods more efficient, cheaper and safer as well, but I hope our society and economic systems somehow can find useful, productive ways for the occupationally displaced to survive. It’s going to be a growing issue as progress races on.
Spider-Dan
@Omnes Omnibus: The better analogy would be: in a real-life country where violent murder was not only allowed, but actively encouraged by law (and really, the only point of existing), should we be concerned about people making wanking motions with their hands?
Shell
Doesn’t this guy show up every election cycle?
Election expert declares Trump is going to be the next president. Forget the polls. Donald Trump is going to be the next president — at least according to one pretty accurate election model developed by Helmut Norpoth
RSA
@Aleta:
Our computer science program includes a required ethics course, and I’ve forwarded the CNN article to the course coordinator and instructor.
Botsplainer
Clearly, the gaming world needs a modern version of a Hays Code in order to protect the safe spaces of all potential participants, from age 3 through age 90.
That’ll certainly enhance the experiences and choices available to game participants, since it did so very much for the world of cinema….
? Martin
@Captain C:
That’s not a value-add to the product. You don’t gauge a product based on how far from your house it was produced. That cost is factored into the product. Now, it may affect the cost of the product, which you will reward or penalize, but it doesn’t affect the quality of the product itself. It may be a value-add to you, but you generally aren’t paying that shipping cost.
That’s the part of Amazon that people don’t quite get – a prime subscription is basically a fixed economic offset to your marginal cost of driving to the store (the cost of getting it to the store is already part of the retail price of the item). But once that costs is absorbed, then there is no more value-add to be had. And that’s what Amazon is aiming to do – to make delivery to your door costless to you (the true cost is invisible, part of the cost of the product). Once that is done, they can then iterate on driving the cost of delivery down without you getting a vote as to how they do it. You are no longer invested. That’s the inevitable end-state with an increasingly automated sector.
Captain C
@Schlemazel: I think a friend of mine owned that in college.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: Alia Bhatt is an up and coming actor working in the Hindi film industry. She is the daughter of Mahesh Bhatt (director) and Soni Razdan (actor). I have only seen her in songs from Highway and Kapoor and Sons. From what I have seen she is talented. She also won a lot of acclaim for her portrayal of a migrant worker in Udta Punjab (Flying Punjab) a recent movie on the mostly unsuccessful war on drugs in the Indian state of Punjab.
I don’t know anything about Dear Zindagi. (Dear Life)
Here she is in the road song from Highway, music by ARR and sung by Nooran sisters.
Spider-Dan
@Mnemosyne: It would be more accurate to say that I don’t necessarily recognize what is taking place in those games as actual sexual harassment. I think it’s a reach to apply real-life principles to these kinds of scenarios, especially since players aren’t exactly required to play as their real-life gender (or even any gender at all, in games with robotic characters).
As I said in a previous post, I’d compare this to calling a wanking motion with your hand “simulated sexual assault.” There’s no physical contact or interaction; the players simply pass through one another.
Johnny
Oh FFS
Get real
Botsplainer
QUERY – in a world where the roughest possible games are Tetris, Candy Crush and Bejeweled (although that deep voice on “level up” is malevolently male), how much more productive will people be?
There are some warning phrases I’d give about turning gaming into an Andrea Dworkin/Catherine MacKinnon seminar about Power and the Patriarchy, but y’all know them already.
DISCLOSURE – I’m not a gamer, and tend to be of the mindset that the ones most likely to do a “virtual grope” didn’t get bullied enough in high school.
prob50
@Brachiator:
Your secondary job loss explanation lays the issue out more clearly than my last post.
On the bright side, I did delete a stupid Star Trek analogy from that one. That should save a lot of eye-rolling, at least for a few minutes.
Omnes Omnibus
@Spider-Dan: You are clearly clueless.
? Martin
@Brachiator:
No, the problem is the impedance in the system. The new jobs are created faster than the old ones are wiped out (many studies have shown this), but the individuals displaced by the shift are poorly aligned with the new jobs in many ways – geographically, educationally, etc. and the costs of getting them into alignment are substantial and take longer than anyone can afford to carry them out. So that truck driving job is replaced by a coding job – how long to train that person to code? Can they go without income for that time? Can we keep that job open waiting for them to get up to speed? The last time we went through this we knocked people off of farms and into factories. That was a much easier educational transition, but it was geographically challenging. The result was cities, but it just required people to move. That’s fast. That’s where China is now. The educational challenge is much harder. It’s difficult to do quickly, and our educational institutions aren’t geared for that job.
That’s one of the big open questions. The answer is they may be kept in the parking lots that are generally completely empty at night (and a massive economic waste of money). Or they may be kept in your driveway. It depends on who owns the car. Maybe we own the cars and lease them out to Uber for use, allowing us to use our capital to generate income. Or maybe Uber owns the cars, putting their capital up, but then renting our driveways or someones parking lot to store them in? Or maybe the shopping mall owns the cars and charges the retailers to bring consumers to their stores? Nobody quite knows which economic model will prevail.
But the answer may involve how the cars charge. One option is to do induction charging in the parking spot, allowing the car to charge up while parked. The value of a power-less parking space may go to zero and the value of one that charges cars goes up. Whoever is willing to capitalize the cost of putting chargers in parking spaces (whether your driveway or at the mall) may largely determine who owns the cars.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Growing up, I have seen with my own eyes adult men (joined by a few women) beat the shit out of a man who groped a woman. The man’s behavior was not tolerated, nor was it expected that the woman stay inside or be judged negatively.
Obviously, this is a complex area. And there is also how women have been treated in court when assault cases or dealt with.
Again, I am not sure that there is a universal set of expectations about online behavior. Also, sadly, there are (primarily men) who don’t expect a woman to shrug off bad or inappropriate behavior. Some feel free or emboldened to dismiss her altogether. They don’t give a shit.
I think what happens is that in the real world there is often a social sphere. But there is also a hierarchy. People are invited. People know each other. People know where other people live, who they are connected to. In the online and virtual world, people who are angry or who would be considered misfits can freely join in. This is not always negative. People who felt that they did not belong can find new connections. But the other side of it is that people who are bullies and worse not only can sometimes freely act, they find their own community of bullies who will aid and abet their worse behavior. And a lot of their negative behavior is directed at women. Again, in the real world, there are all kinds of social constraints that might force them to behave. In the online and virtual space, there are no equivalent constraints.
The Thin Black Duke
@Spider-Dan: Dude, when all the women here are telling you how fucking creepy this is, maybe you should at the very least pretend to listen?
Mnemosyne
@Spider-Dan:
Oh, well, if a random dude on the internet who didn’t bother to read the actual story assumes that sexual harassment can’t exist online, then it must not exist. Case closed!
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
Yes, here is a code to surely make gaming better. Safe Spaces should prevail at all times.
Gin & Tonic
@schrodinger’s cat:
Would likely go faster if you had a dude helping.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Right, but the point here is that equivalent restraints could exist if written into the game. If there was an ability to, say, downvote or shun a misbehaving player, you could probably get groups to do that, IF you can first get men to not shrug off online harassment as no big deal.
As you can see from the comments here, getting men to recognize that online harassment is an actual problem in the first place is still a very big hurdle to get over.
schrodinger's cat
@Gin & Tonic: Are you volunteering?
Mnemosyne
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
Dude, where did you make this thing up in your head where not letting VR players grope other players without their consent is censorship?
Jesus, you have daughters and you still think this shit is A-OK for random guys to do to them with no consequences?
Gin & Tonic
@schrodinger’s cat: Of course not. Just trying to keep this thread at the level it seems to be at. Do we have to explain *every* virtual interaction?
Major Major Major Major
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: nobody is even talking about doing something like that, for fuck’s sake. This is more analogous to saying R-rated movies are different from porn.
Pogonip
@Botsplainer: Most of the classics were made in the Hays era.
Pogonip
@Gin & Tonic: Ah, he’d probably just drink all her beer.
My dad was the world’s best packer. He could fit an elephant into a Pinto. Unfortunately he failed to instruct his children in the art.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
Here’s the clip from the film.
Maybe it was the mood I was in, but I found it to be cute, even if not super original. I liked the charisma and interaction of the two main actors.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: Did you check out my review of Queen?
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: Alia and Priyanka are quite good but my latest girl crush is Kangana, she can do no wrong.
Brachiator
@? Martin:
I think you are wrong about this, and this reflects a bias that you have. I have seen some of the studies, and I think that they are very easily contradicted by reality.
More on this, perhaps in another space.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
I did not have a chance to look at it. I am making a note of it.
As an aside, I think that some magical YouTube algorithm put of the “Dear Zindagi” clip and the clip of Priyanka dancing with Travolta because I viewed this fun clip of Travolta from the film Michael.
YouTube works in mysterious ways.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@Mnemosyne:
It is a problem without a solution, unless we’re handing out specifically identified licenses to surf the internet.
Problem is, even WITH the licenses, in any sort of official enforcement action, what are the standards of proof? What is the forum for that action?
How do you prove the groper was the person on the account?
What if the groper is from Morocco and the victim from Ontario?
Another possible method would be to charge substantial money to “buy in” game access, which could be forfeited by bad conduct. Of course, in that ecology, interest in the game would be scant, as both men and women would be seeking lower cost alternatives.
I’m not unsympathetic to the issue, but you can either have broad market choices where the participant needs to be aware that it isn’t always going to be the perfect experience if they choose to use the product, or throttled back, regulated choices which genuinely suck for everybody but the most tender-minded.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@Pogonip:
Not fond of Hays Code era movies. Real people don’t act that way, and much of the stupid we see in conservative laments about “the way things were” really goes back to false memories of the halcyon hue of that world.
Major Major Major Major
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: wtf are you talking about? These are all private spaces with moderators. MMOs already have a blocking and banning system that’s intermediated by the companies running them, it works fine. Just need to apply that here.
? Martin
@Brachiator: I’d enjoy that.
RSA
@Mnemosyne:
Yes. @Brachiator makes very good observations. I agree that we don’t have comparable social restraints in online environments because we haven’t put them there. It’s a harder problem than in the real world, but it’s important to work on it.
Citizen_X
@Major Major Major Major:
Well, that would require taking women’s concerns seriously.
Which, as demonstrated in this thread, can be difficult for some people.
Eric S.
@Schlemazel:
As a fellow guy, I’m going to suggest yes. I play a lot of softball including several co-ed teams. A couple years ago a new guy came on to one team. He was single and did some, awkward to my eye, flirting. My GF told me he was weird and none of the girls were interested.
Fine. I dismissed it as his awkwardness and him playing out of his league if you will. Later, when it was just the two of us at the sponsor bar, he started pulling up FB pages and showing me pics if his friends’ “hot girlfriends” and other women he knew.
Total creep! The ladies spotted it right away.
Mnemosyne
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
I didn’t realize that you’re a software engineer in addition to being a lawyer. When did that happen?
In the meantime, since all of the other software engineers on the thread are saying they could totally add user controls that would prevent this kind of game behavior, I think you should probably stick to lawyering.
Aleta
Second Life has a “mute” feature where you can instantly and permanently shut up a harrasser. Also griefers can be banned from spaces.
The Other Chuck
@Mnemosyne:
I’m a software engineer, and anyone who suggests they have a technological answer is lying, deluded, or both. It’s not a fucking software problem, unless you count the mentality of the players.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
@Brachiator:
Don’t forget Quark’s holodecks in Deep Space 9. He did not pretend
that they were only for approved purposes.
BTW, Betty C., you owe me an apology for tricking me into clicking on the Instaputz.
Spider-Dan
@Mnemosyne: Sorry, I misspoke. Sexual harassment happens all too frequently online; the kind of talk that comes through the voice chat is some of the most racist, homophobic, and misogynistic talk you will ever hear from a human voice, and it certainly constitutes harassment.
What I meant is that I don’t recognize this as sexual assault. To say that it is is to say that one can be sexually assaulted by a hologram that has no ability to physically interact with your person (or, in the game world, your character); the fact that the offender doesn’t actually interact with the victim (like they do when they kill them) matters. And I still think it’s incongruous to say that a game in which the primary objective is to violently kill your opponents should take specific efforts to make sure sexually suggestive actions cannot take place.
Spider-Dan
@The Thin Black Duke: It’s hard to interpret what “creepy” means in this context, when someone says that it’s “creepy” to conflate sex with violence… during a discussion about sexual harassment in a violent VR shooting game.
Xecky Gilchrist
This is a big part of the reason I don’t play online games. If I wanted to see or experience bullying, groping, and other assholish behavior I’d stay in the real world.
WarMunchkin
As someone who has spent probably years of his life in virtual worlds, I want to say that I’d absolutely regard this as something closer to sexual harassment but different from both sexual assault and sexual harassment. Also, noting that this is fucking shitty debate, since it’s an ugly thing to do to someone regardless, so in some sense this is a “call it Radical Islam!!!1!1!” debate. This isn’t teabagging some random toon; VR is a much more intimate projection of self.
Rather, I just want to point out that groping, assault and harassment are traumatic in real life – are classified as behaviors that obstruct or damage people in real life – and are therefore governable by authorities present in real life. This is a little different from online because virtual worlds don’t really have the concept of democratic governance; consent of the governed is waived when you sign a EULA, so to speak. So the only way to find redress within the confines of the world is to seek it from the provisioning authority, which is the company itself, even if you’re engaged in acts that could broadly be described as commerce, using real world currency, within the virtual world.
But there’s no doubt that virtual sexual assault seeks to damage and dominate people in the real world in the same way that real world sexual assault and harassment do. It imparts demonstrable harm on another human being and should therefore be classified as a criminal act even if it doesn’t fit neatly into the categories we know about right now. So, I’d dispense with both the categories discussed above and call this virtual sexual assault, associate real-world criminal penalties with the behavior, and have the ability to flag and print a log of actions taken by a user to use as evidence in a real-world court.
Mnemosyne
@Spider-Dan:
So only words can be part of sexual harassment and not actions? Yeah, no, that’s not how it works.
Since VR is almost exclusively visual right now, this probably is better classified as sexual harassment at the moment, but when the technology improves to the point where someone can touch another person during the game, what then? Is that just something else women are supposed to shrug off as no big deal, just the price they have to pay to be permitted in what should by rights be an exclusively male space?
Mnemosyne
@The Other Chuck:
A technological answer to stop guys from being assholes in the first place? Probably not. But saying that you can’t ban people or prevent players from touching each other uninvited means you don’t think it’s a real problem, so you haven’t bothered to look into it.
LurkerExtraordinaire
@trnc: Could we please not associate transgendered people with horrible things like sexual assault and harassment (be it virtual or real)? Forcing a non-transgendered player to “become transgendered” as punishment does no one any favors.
gwangung
@Spider-Dan:
As people have pointed out, that’s YOUR problem, and not other people’s. You need to make the allowances, not others.
WarMunchkin
@WarMunchkin: Just adding more, I realized that some real fucked-up “subversive” shit is possible here that somewhat invalidates what I was saying above. You could make a video game where all players take the appearance of young schoolgirls and establish a pvp framework where players get points for assaulting each other. Technically free speech and almost certainly will come out of Japan within the next five years.
For most games, however, I think it’s important to establish industry standards and conventions about how to protect players from virtual sexual assault and associated traumas. Industry leaders should come together early and often to mutually establish and iterate upon guidelines.
Spider-Dan
@Mnemosyne: When people can actually touch other people in game, developers will have the ability to prevent them from touching certain areas (or simply never build that in to begin with), much like they already prevent/not include the ability to forcibly disrobe others now.
Ultimately, you seem to be talking about trying to prevent any action in-game that can possibly be construed as sexual harassment through technical solutions. When the currently-existing standard is “crouching over dead body” or “passing hand through torso/groin,” I don’t think it’s going to be possible to eliminate harassment via technical solutions. What should we do if a player follows another player around making a blowjob motion with his own hand? What should we do if a player follows 3 feet away making hip thrusting motions? Consider that games are becoming more detailed, not less, and that players will have more options to be inventive with their methods of harassment. The imagination of teenaged gamers is limitless.
The only real solution is reporting harassment – be it sexism, racism, homophobia, or just plain assholery – and muting/ejecting players. There is no other technical solution that is compatible with the increasing realism in gaming technology. The idiots always evolve faster than the idiot-proof solution.
Spider-Dan
@gwangung: Wait… are you saying that this is literally sexual assault and should be legally prosecuted as such? If not, you may want to climb down off your high horse. We all have our opinions on how this should be classified and dealt with, but let’s not pretend that You Are Definitely Right and I Am Definitely Wrong.