In SuperhotVR there are multiple acts of self harm; Shooting oneself in the head, jumping to your death. They make up a very very small amount of the game's content. After an update which made those scenes optional, the devs did another update and removed them all together. The VR community has surprisingly responded in a very mature and supportive manner.
LOL, just kidding. They're totally shitting themselves. https://old.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/op018r/all_scenes_alluding_to_self_harm_will_be_removed/ https://steamcommunity.com/games/617830/announcements/detail/2992063678829322337
I hate to defend :reddit-logo: but the top replies on that thread are all completely reasonable. Having it be toggleable seems like the best option. The narrative was built around this Bioshock-esque "you don't have any control here, you're just a puppet" theme and the self-harm was an extreme reinforcement of that.
In the 5 seconds at the end of a round in pavlov TTT, every single player in the server always tries to kill themselves and everyone around them.
Now I can't stop thinking about Persona 3 where the main characters summon their Pokemon by shooting themselves in the head . Repeatedly. You watch the heroes commit "suicide" like 10,000 times before you've finished the game.
I agree with keeping it a toggle, but also making it default to not having to do these things (especially) in VR
Even then, couldn't having the player point a gun at their own head set something off in someone who wasn't entirely aware of any previous suicidal behavior? Seems like it could have a negative effect whether or not you make it a toggle. Or suicidal people turning it on because they're suicidal. Most of the time even in real life people try not to mention suicide or make jokes about it. It's something where bringing it up doesn't help anyone unless it's in a closely monitored setting.
And yet remove it, and it's still the same game. There's a downvoted comment in there talking about VR as a technology and its influence on the brain as opposed to the fact that we use it for games that I think covers it the best. I'm reminded of when Jeremy Bailenson, psychologist and the head of stanford's virtual human communication lab, asked vr developers to consider that what they were creating was no longer just a video game but software running on simulator hardware and reddit blew the fuck up comparing him to Jack Thompson.
This is the angle I think a lot of people are overlooking. It's one thing to do looking at a screen using a mouse and keyboard or controller which adds layers of abstraction on what you're doing. It's a whole other thing when there's very realistic physicality to it in VR that is, in my opinion, crossing a line into very dangerous territory. Content in VR should be treated differently than normal games.
Exactly. It's crazy that like every VR enthusiast is out there thirsting for Full Dive VR, because it's goign to be real, while not grasping the implications of what that means about what's happening in your head. Like how many videos do we need of people knowing full well they're in VR and yet doing stupid shit like jumping into walls in that Plank experience game because the part of their brain that's telling them it's just a game you're totally safe is overshadowing the part of the brain that's keeping track of the outside world?
Yes, people got used to it, but those same underlying functions happening in the brain are still there and they're only going to get more powerful as the technology advances. The entire goal of VR tech is to hijack so many of the senses that the brain no longer has a reference point to determine the difference between the real and the virtual. And that's not even really factoring in the danger of what's going to happen as we incorporate eye tracking, eeg, and other biometrics.
And btw, despite using modern VR for more than 6 years now, and playing half-life alyx for more than 50 hours with 3 play throughs I still find myself occasionally having uncontrollably visceral feelings of disgust to things like one of those nasty dark gray headcrabs crawling out of a dumpster next to me. And that's with video details on low. Each play through I've added something additional like a better headset or haptics and each time it results in a more immersive, fresher experience. We're barely scratching the surface.
You’re gonna blow your mind when you hear the concept of horror. I do the same when I replay Amnesia the Dark Descent every Halloween. People have been having emotional reactions to media for as long as it’s existed. This isn’t unique to VR in the slightest, it applies to literally every piece of media.
lol , you're agreeing with me and don't yet realize it. Do you think these are different cognitive mechanisms we're talking about? If people now are "used to movies" and not freaking out over trains, what changed that allowed them to make fools of themselves in VR? What we're talking about is an increasing exploitation of those same mechanisms. We went from surround sound and bigger and bigger screens in the cinema to smaller ones strapped to your face for stereoscopy that blows away typical cinema 3d and gives us almost total control over the visual cortex. By adding responsive movement tracking to the screens we're taking over our equilibrium and balance and overpowering our ability to track the world beyond the headset. By adding in hands and body tracking we're tying in our proprioception mapping to "dissolve" our brain's ability to track the body. Matter of fact much of Bailenson's research ties into how that affects our self-image, they're doing shit like giving peoples third arms and putting in them cow bodies. Again, we're barely scratching the surface and you're telling me that people got used to it while also telling me you get physiological reactions to configurations of light on a screen. We got used to it by accepting these things happening as part of the new normal, but the technology is still doing a number our brain.
There's been some use of VR in helping people get over PTSD, so I'm kinda inclined to side with the "VR makes things different enough that extra care should be taken" crowd.
I'm not sure I follow you here. Is the concern that the extra physicality of raising a gun to your head inside a VR game represents an extra psychological risk over doing so in a traditional keyboard-and-mouse-and-screen game? I haven't done any research into the subject, but I don't think that experience in VR is going to have any more of an impact on a person than it would otherwise (though obviously if someone has suffered trauma and has legitimate triggers from such an experience their experience is going to be drastically different, but that's why the toggle exists).
Have you ever heard of toilet paper bondage? TLDR: It's kind of a niche concept within kink where one understands that behavior modification through domination happens over time in small doses. One wrapping of toilet paper around your wrists isn't enough to confine you, but over time if one keeps wrapping it over and over you'll find yourself subdued. VR in its current form is like that. It's still at a phase where the links between our VR in game behavior and our real world behavior is tenuous, but they are linked. That's literally what many psych researchers (and facebook for much darker reasons) have been waiting on advancements in VR for, because of the rich possibilities that VR has for therapeutic behavior modification in the form of non-threatening gamified experiences.
These games that have people kill themselves because it's funny and/or edgy are creating mental links between self-harming behaviors/mindsets and ingame rewards. And again, while the links are tenuous and miniscule, they are there. And for some people, they may be strengthening harmful thoughts and behaviors that are already lurking beneath the surface.
These games that have people kill themselves because it’s funny and/or edgy are creating mental links between self-harming behaviors/mindsets and ingame rewards.
Yeah, people aren't killing themselves IRL for points. This is a pretty absurd leap in logic.
It's not a leap in logic, it's literally how we form behaviors.
You can't reduce all human behaviors to reinforcement. People do not kill themselves because they're anticipating reward.
I don't exactly have the room here for a treatise on relational frame theory, dude.
That's an interesting concept I haven't seen before, thanks for the link.
I can see the logic here, but I think there's a disconnect between learned behaviors regarding random things like being bound by a single layer of toilet paper and things your body has an immense physiological aversion to like self-harm. I could very definitely see this kind of VR experience being problematic for people who already struggle with suicidal ideation or have PTSD or something similar, but not so much for neuronormatives.
From the reddit thread:
Honestly, the self harm stuff was in poor taste and Im surprised it took this long. I used to host VR meet ups in my city and kids always wanted to play super hot, totally makes sense but I felt VERY wrong promoting the game to kids. The self harm stuff did NOTHING for the game other than make it feel awkward and dark. I don't know why they ever thought it was a cool idea in the first place.
lol, -10. Not sure it's a kids game anyway, but given what else they're playing out there I get it.
As always in conversations about what video games should and shouldn't portray, I think art should be willing to depict difficult subject matter, maybe even flippantly so, but I think games don't take themselves to be art, so it's kind of besides the point. If the developers had confidence in their work's artistic merit, they would have left it as a toggle option (or even simply a trigger warning), but this sort of decision gives the impression that they didn't think they were saying much at all, and if that's what they think, I'm inclined to believe them.
That's honestly the attitude most developers, including "indie" developers, seem to take, and I only wish there was a critical mass of devs who felt otherwise to fill the hole.
Not all art has to be for all people.
so now that it's not for them, they're mad?
also implying that 90+% of games don't exist for the purpose of milking gamer money in general
I really doubt China gives a fuck if Americans are killing themselves.
My rig is weak and doesn't handle unoptimized experiences like vrchat and neosVR well, unfortunately. Maybe if it's a simple world...
