Virtual reality allows users to enter an unreal world in order to escape their everyday problems. But as VR technology advances and proliferates, acts that would be crimes in the real world have crept in.
Jordan Belamire was the victim of one such “crime.”
The incident went down while Belamire (a pseudonym) was playing a game called “QuiVr.” In real life, she was standing next to her husband in her brother-in-law’s living room. In the game, users travel around a snow-capped mountain killing zombies with a bow and arrow. Her avatar, like all other avatars in the game, was simply a disembodied, floating helmet and two hands clutching a bow. The only indication that other players would have of her gender would be her voice.
Belamire was having a great time mowing down the undead next to another user, whose handle she identified as BigBro442. Then, in between waves of zombies, BigBro442’s avatar turned to Belamire’s avatar and started to rub near her virtual breasts.
Belamire screamed, “Stop!” but the admonishment only served to spur the him on.
“He chased me around, making grabbing and pinching motions near my chest. Emboldened, he even shoved his hand toward my virtual crotch and began rubbing,” Belamire wrote on Medium.
Even though she knew that the groping wasn’t real, Belamire still felt like she was being violated.
“Of course, you’re not physically being touched, just like you’re not actually one hundred feet off the ground,” she explained, “but it’s still scary as hell.” She quit the game after minutes of this harassment.‘No one should be able to treat another player like the author had been treated again.’
- QuiVr developers
Equally scary for Belamire was the reaction she got on Twitter. Many people seemed to think that sexual assault wasn’t even possible because it happened in virtual reality, Belamire told CNN Money. Even worse, some Twitter users said that she was a whiner who should just laugh the whole thing off.
Belamire, however, did not find the incident funny. Many women have reported being groped in VR and some games seem to have been designed with groping in mind.
In Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, for example, users can poke and prod a buxom virtual woman who protests with exaggerated girlish giggles, according to a report from Engadget.com.
While many game developers have dragged their feet in the battle against virtual groping, the men behind “QuiVr” reacted quickly to Belamire’s story.
“Our first response was, ‘Let’s make sure this never happens again,'” “QuiVr” developer Aaron Stanton told CNN Money.
Together with the game’s creator Jonathan Schenker, Stanton wrote an op-ed on Uploadvr.com, in which he expressed deep sorrow in regards to Belamire’s experience.
“The first thing I felt was that we had let someone down. We should have prevented this in the first place,” the developers wrote. “How could we have overlooked something so obvious?”
“No one should be able to treat another player like the author had been treated again.”
The developers also proposed a possible solution. Their idea is to create a “‘power gesture” – putting your hands together, pulling both triggers, and pulling them apart as if you are creating a force field.” When the gesture is made by a player being virtually groped any nearby users would disappear from view, thus giving control back to the victim.
In essence, the victim could create their own virtual safe space.
Maybe Schenker and Stanton’s idea will catch on — they proposed making the gesture a universal standard for VR — but in Belamire’s case, it’s too late.
“Women are allowed, sure,” Belamire wrote of her VR experience, “but the BigBro442s of the world will make sure you never want to come back.”