I think that the article is quite interesting, albeit disturbingly so, due to the story behind the sexual assault in a digital program. I gathered that the virtual experience played heavily on themes of sexual intercourse/abuse which could have traumatic effects on the human psyche. The part that I was waiting for was for a survivor to have experienced the virtual world, which of course would bring back the feeling/memory of the experience. Once that happened the author almost had a revelation as to how VR can effect people with similar experiences. It shows that people don’t always think of how a disturbing pleasure for them is or has been an actual nightmare for someone else. I enjoyed the article because it spoke of the distinction between reality and digital can be quite blurred with the technology that is being developed now as far as virtual reality. Some thing that came to mind after reading it was a coding in a computer was what kind of sick person codes it sexual abuse for fun. Of course, with advancing technology there is a moral responsibility that people have to use the technology in ways more so to benefit than to harm. As readers discovered in the chapter, the reader was unaware that the event that happened in the chapter was fake until otherwise told. The shock from reading someone’s experience is pretty brutal, I can only imagine the VR experience. People are going to use the VR for their own purposes and every program is going to have a link to some belief or experience of the programmer. I would like to know what the specific motive was to create such an experience knowing how it can be taken up by certain voyeurs and if the creator even thought about the social implications of the VR program to begin with.
2 thoughts on “Tiny VR Big Impact”
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Game Studies 
I’m glad to see that you are looking at the human psyche part of this article. For my lack of understanding in some of these areas, I decided to make a more philosophical approach regarding how virtual societies should report others for harassment and game sabotage. The one thing I understood was how this can trigger someone in the real world. We all know that women (particularly in online gaming) are harassed far more than men are, and to put a woman in a “virtual rape” event is quite disgusting. I have friends and family that have dealt with issues like this, and I know that this would trigger them. I was held up at gunpoint when I worked at GameStop a couple years ago, and I couldn’t play games or watch shows with violence for a couple weeks after. Every single time I would see a gun, I would go back to that instance and imagine the robber pulling the trigger. Maybe I was dealing with some survivals guilt, but I was then able to understand these certain situations more clearly. In the article, one of the players in the game brought on the philosophical question: “Where does the mind end and the body begin?”. Another player replied along the lines of “in this game, our mind IS our body”. It blurs the lines, and really makes you think about how we should approach these situations. Great post!
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It’s a little crazy to think that if a person can hide themselves behind an avatar/game/string of code, a person can feel an unwavering sense of limitless that can happen in a game. Games can be a place to experiment in darker thoughts that aren’t usually explored. VR brings reality a little bit closer to the game world, I wonder how exactly we will handle this with better technology where perhaps game world and real world is way more blurred.
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