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'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.