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
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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