The Story of A(vatar)
Erotic misadventures in the metaverse.
Because the metaverse is online, it is already full of sex pests. Such is the nature of all remote communications. Sexual misbehavior flourishes on email, through message boards, in chat rooms, through phones (pre-smart and smart), on social media and antisocial media. Anonymity helps but even identification doesn’t always deter. Of course, plenty of perversions make their ways into real life. But simulation seems to offer a license for stimulation.
The New York Times reported on the growing problem of sexual harassment in virtual reality spaces:
“Chanelle Siggens recently strapped on an Oculus Quest virtual reality headset to play her favorite shooter game, Population One. Once she turned on the game, she maneuvered her avatar into a virtual lobby in the immersive digital world and waited for the action to begin.
But as she waited, another player’s avatar approached hers. The stranger then simulated groping…”
Well, to quote Saturday Night Live’s Church Lady, isn’t that special? Here was Chanelle, all ready for action in Population One, and she got more than she bargained for in the form of formless fornication. And just what game was Chanelle so excited to play? Perhaps a little football? Maybe chase some ghosts around a maze while popping power pellets?
No, Population: One is a “battle royal” where Chanelle can, “Drop into a colorful, near future world with limitless combat possibilities. Welcome to POPULATION: ONE, where you and your squad must fight together to survive until the end.” All Chanelle wanted, for relaxation and entertainment, was to pretend to murder a whole bunch of people as part of a spree shooting and somebody groped the fake character that she was using to play mass murderer.
Presumably, had the other character stabbed, shot, choked or otherwise violently mutilated Chanelle’s avatar, that would have all been in good fun and she would not have been quoted in The Times. Chanelle confronted the other player and said to cut it out, only to be told that “It’s the metaverse, I’ll do what I want.”
On one hand, there’s a contract implicit in the game that the groper has broken. The players are there to kill or be killed, not to be digitally molested. The game designers have a problem because players feel duped when they show up for murder, mayhem and violence but get felt up. In performing arts we call this a “performance contract,” where just about anything goes, but only if the audience has given informed consent by showing up. So, if you sell tickets to a rock concert but your band shows up without instruments and pelts the audience with eggs, you’ve violated the contract and the audience is right to be angry, to complain, to demand refunds and to defame you forever.
On the other hand, Chanelle’s complaint is still that her harasser has made her simulated murder spree feel icky. Perhaps I’m making too much of the murder-shooty part of Chanelle’s pastime. The game looks cartoony, after all, and there seems to be some backstory where it’s avatars killing other avatars rather than people killing people. But all of that applies to the sex, too. It’s all cartoony. None of it is realistic.
The game designer will probably have to find a way to disable lewd acts in the killing fields. Or, the metaverse can let the users work this stuff out and Chanelle can have her revenge by crashing through a virtual brothel with a tank.
The Middlebrow remains unsurprised, though, that as with movies, video games, music and other entertainments, that the primary concern of metaverse misbehavior is based on sex, rather than violence and that there’s no mention at all of the most ruinous aspect of Metaverse living -- the potential for financial exploitation as sophisticated designers of digital baubles utilize the seductions of immersive experience to separate people from their real world dollars, leaving tem with nothing but dreams stored in some company’s cloud.
The Times seems unconcerned.