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.
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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.
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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.
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Yeah I'm not really knowledgeable about that stuff 👍
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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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I don't talk about your airsoft idea because I find it laughable how you ignore the environment around airsoft as if most of the people involved in airsoft aren't playing war games fulfilling jingoist fantasies of the imperial nation that they've been raised in. But if you'd like me to address it; feel free to put an airsoft gun to your head, pull the trigger, and then get back to me if the feeling of the pellet bouncing off your skull encourages you to do it again the way people are whining about not being able to do it in VR anymore since that's what this conversation spawned from in the first place.
What makes you think we haven't? As if there aren't fucking massive fandoms of people cosplaying and getting way too into their favorite characters. Entire industries built on fulfilling those fantasies. A book, television, or movie is such a small portion of our lives, of our sensory inputs, and yet it fully takes over some peoples' lives.
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Lol. Aighty. Night.
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lmao. Yeah, the one acting like a debatebro here is definitely me. If I ever get to fulfill my hope of touring the VHIL I'll be sure to let them know some random guy on the internet says that in their almost 20 years of studying the psychological implications of VR that they forgot to consider movies. Take care.
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😂😂😂 Yep, I've already filled out their applications to be baker acted based on a very narrow and outdated version of neurotypical standards. That's definitely what I said.
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No, actually I'm not. You're the one ignoring that we all live in an objective reality, but that we experience it subjectively. This entire thread is about how VR modifies that subjective experience in an insanely effective manner that blows away other media, and then there's you with a non-sequitur about airsoft shit and a tired old argument about movie trains.🤷♂️
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You: If this was something to worry about, we all would have turned into Don Quixote in our literature class.
Me: Here's how people attempt to do precisely that with modern media.
You: HOW FUCKING DARE YOU!!!!
lol. You're either on some serious bad faith gamer debatebro shit or obscenely out of your element, dude. I don't give a fuck about what outdated labels you're using to describe the variations of people's subjective realities, but the fact that you're now trying to to argue against people having their realities shaped by media on a site which regularly discusses how effective manufacturing consent works is fucking mindblowing.
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Oh!😂😂😂 lol. That's on me. I haven't read Don Quixote. I thought we were talking about people's tendency to mimic characters and peoples they feel a strong emotional connection to. My bad. I guess I should put that on my reading list.
You should absolutely be questioning any media you consume. Not doing so is like taking a glass from a random stranger and gulping it down without question. That being said, let's say you're watching TV and do some really, really rough calculations. Depending on the size of the TV, how far away the tv is, how loud it is, etc, that TV screen is only taking up a small percentage of your sensory bandwidth. Ignoring how detail blurs towards the peripheral, the FOV of an eye is about 120 degrees. So if a tv is 20 feet away from you and lets say 52inches 16:9, the area (I'm just calculating a flat circle rather than a complicated orb which would be even more) of your eye's field of view is going to be approximately 543671 in2 but the surface area of the tv is about 1160 in2 meaning that of your visual bandwidth the tv is only taking up approximately .02%. Short of having an insane sound system, The only two sensory systems of your brain that's going to be engaged by the information coming from that .02% of bandwidth is going to be your sight and auditory senses. The video isn't going to respond to your head movements, and it's not stereoscopic so it doesn't have depth, which in addition to lacking retina resolution (tho UHD is getting there) is how your brain knows it's not looking through a window. In order for that .02% of visual information to make an impact in your mind it has to rely on things like appealing to authority, social proofing, and various storytelling techniques which often leverage cognitive biases. Much of those techniques are ingrained in us through pavlovian association after years of watching TV; that "getting used to it" that keeps us from running away when a train is on TV is also a double edged sword that "automatically" gives certain news stations authority in certain peoples' minds or allows us to enjoy cartoons or whatever without having to remind how the flat images are metaphors for real people, etc...
VR on the other hand doesn't need to rely on those secondary techniques to make an impact, the technology is interacting with your subconscious as if it were real through exploiting the technical limitations of your senses. Through domination of your visual input and blinding out any other competing information (ie the rest of your fov) it essentially takes over 100% of your visual bandwidth, same with your auditory bandwidth if your headphones are good. The addition of head tracking that television lacks, combined with high resolution and increasing refresh rates, allows for the "window confusion" that television does not while doing so without the limit of a border. VR is literally hacking the brain through technological exploitation, the storytelling and psychological techniques that TV or movies require for immersion only increase the ability of VR to make an impact. The only method the brain has to discern reality from VR is through the input of sensory systems we don't yet have under our control, sensory systems that we are racing to build hardware for. Controllers and hand tracking merely increase the areas of the brain VR dominates, haptic feedback likes vests or the Teslasuit give us a taste of the sort of levels of immersion we have to look forward to.
And we use all this technology, all this cognitive domination, to play around in virtual Skinner boxes, "games" that are having impacts on our minds in ways that most people using the tech fully deny. Which again will become even more dangerous as we advance the tech into eye tracking, eeg, and other biometrics that allow vr experience creators (and most assuredly facebook) insight into what that skinner box is doing to the mind experiencing it.
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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.
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.
So instead of substantiating your point that suicide-esque elements of Superhot VR will actually lead people to kill themselves you're just going to namedrop a highly speculative psychological theory.
I'm saying that as the technology advances the line between in VR game behaviors and real world behaviors will blur and behavior learned in one will easily cross over to behavior in the other. That's not really debatable, it's the point of VR.
It's super debatable actually, since it's just an extension of the claim that behaviors in videogames induce the same behaviors in real life, to say nothing about how abstracted Superhot is from real life, let alone the real life conditions of suicide.
Have you ever used VR?
Yeah, it's sick but it makes me nauseous.
what kind was it?
I've tried a couple of the Vive models and one Oculus, both for Steam, and also PSVR and some kind of phone thing.
Damn, that's a shame, give it another generation if the vive and oculus messes with you. But part of that sickness comes from the dissonance between what your eyes and ears are experiencing and what your brain is expecting based on information its receiving from other senses. It's literally your brain fighting the illusion, as the tech improves, as we learn to hijack more and more of your brain's sensory input, the line blurs between what the brain will be capable of discerning. I gotta go, but long story short, our current VR tech is only grabbing like 30% of our sensory bandwidth in the form of audio, visual, and very minor fuck I forgot the word, touch and body positioning. Haptics, better visuals, lighter headsets, and other tech will push that percentage to a point where shit will drastically change in how we think of reality. as we completely hijack the inputs of the brain in the vat. sorry, in a hurry.
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.
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