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In an immersive virtual environment, what will it be like to kill? Surely a terrifying, electrifying, even thrilling experience. But by embodying killers, we risk making violence more tantalizing, training ourselves in cruelty and normalising aggression.
Virtual reality promises to expand the range of forms we can inhabit and what we can do with those bodies. But what we physically feel shapes our minds. Until we understand the consequences of how violence in virtual reality might change us, virtual murder should be illegal.Aeon counter – do not remove
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I've been using VR for years, starting with the Rift DK1, then the DK2 days, and I'll have owned my HTC Vive for exactly a year this Thursday. I've done and seen some of the most amazing things in VR -- and we're only in the infancy of the technology. I'm very active in the VR community. I can wax ecstatic for pages about VR (or answer nearly any question about it).
But even I see where VR and AR are probably going to lead. Augmented Reality will be viewed the way Millennials view smartphones in 2017 -- as something you'd be devastated and lost to be without for too long. Virtual Reality will be where a lot of future humans spend a lot of their time. The unbelievable experiential and communication opportunities that VR/AR represents today will be degraded, corrupted, polluted, and diseased. It's coming. I can try to make a better tomorrow, and *be* the change I want to see, but it's coming.
I can absolutely attest that things are vastly more intense in VR (especially cockpit-based VR and room-scale VR) than when playing a game on a monitor or TV or watching a movie in a theater. I've driven in VR (in a dedicated driving chair with high quality wheel, pedals, and shifter perfectly aligned to my virtual body) where after a time my conscious mind completely forgot that I wasn't "actually" moving, and had the experience of thinking I was going to DIE for a split second when a wreck was imminent. I've let out a blood-curdling scream when the robot was about to GET ME. I've been taken away to fantastical worlds of light and color of my own creation that made me forget about where my meat body was. I've seen how damned difficult it is to casually kill someone in Grand Theft Auto 5, something that caused me to completely rethink how I interacted in that world once I was actually inside it. I've had the awe-inspiring (and tear-jerking) dream-like exposure of visiting childhood homes and areas in Google Earth VR.
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But as to whether murder in VR should be illegal -- my current thinking is that this would be a form of legislated thought crime.
why stop at virtual reality? lets convict everyone who has played first person or third person shooter games of murder as well.
It's a very good point. The author writes:
Quote:
Humans are embodied beings, which means that the way we think, feel, perceive, and behave is bound up with the fact that we exist as part of and within our bodies. By hijacking our capacity for proprioception—that is, our ability to discern states of the body and perceive it as our own—VR can increase our identification with the character we’re playing.
What she's saying is VR is well beyond playing a game, and I agree -- VR makes playing a game on a relatively tiny flat window screen feel remote and fake. For example, the game Blarp! caused my jaw to drop the first time I tried it in the Vive -- in a lot of ways this simple game where you fling singing little psychedelic eyeballs around an arena with a tether was way more realistic than every Call of Duty or Batman Arkham game ever made.
Calling for stiff legal penalties for actions made in VR *is* a slippery slope though.
But as to whether murder in VR should be illegal -- my current thinking is that this would be a form of legislated thought crime.
What do you think?
As the author notes, murder has been a mainstay of entertainment for a long time. People have enjoyed reading about killing in books, seeing it in movies and doing it in video games. VR murder is just another step in that progression and it's hard to see a line being drawn to prohibit it. Who knows though, if the tech does advance to the point that we cannot easily distinguish VR from reality, and psychological harm does become apparent, there might be a strong push to bring real world law and order to the virtual world.
Conversely, if it could be proven that we are already inside a VR world, how would that effect our thinking about morality?
I remember back in the 70's that some people were calling for banning games like Dungeons and Dragons, claiming that too many of those who played might mistake the fantasy of the game for reality and that they would become dangerous to society. This of course was nonsense but the naysayers were naysayers. While I recognize VR is far more realistic visual stimulation, I genuinely believe the same can be said about other gaming as well as VR. Illegal actions done in reality with real human interaction are illegal, those done in VR, video games or in D&D game are not reality and anyone involved in them likely knows the difference.
Companies are making very lifelike sex dolls and selling them for thousands of dollars. Should we also charge someone with a crime if they came home and raped one of those dolls? OMG! The naysayers could jump up and down and claim if a person was willing to do that to one of those very realistic dolls, then surely they could become so desensitized and do the same thing in reality.
Every time we cross a new threshold of virtual, people will ask the same questions and the naysayers will make the same demands. It is virtual... NOT reality. To criminally prosecute someone for actions committed in a virtual environment is nonsense. Criminally punish people for their actual crimes against humanity... not for virtual crimes.
But then again, that's just MY opinion.
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