Raph Koster Talks About Trolling In Virtual Reality
From MUDs to MMOs, trolling has long been a problem ever since people got together in virtual worlds. Unfortunately, trolling has become even more of an issue with the advent of virtual reality, where, as MIT Technology Review reports, “the feeling of ‘presence’ that can make virtual reality so compelling also makes awkward or hostile interactions with other people much more jarring.” People invading your virtual personal space or trying touching your virtual body without permission just isn’t cool, more so for women.
VR companies AltSpaceVR and High Fidelity have both taken steps and implemented features to help combat trolls in their respective virtual spaces. Both companies have implemented their own versions of what AltSpaceVR calls the “personal space bubble”. The feature allows users to mute offending players or block them by making both parties mutually invisible.
Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of High Fidelity, believes that technological improvements to VR hardware and the addition of more virtual activities will help lessen trolling. He says, “If you give people a lot of creative freedom, then people get along better.” Now, while the same might be true for virtual spaces, this isn’t always the case in MMORPGs, especially sandbox MMOs where you expect to griefers and trollers to jump out of every corner. You hope they don’t but you expect them just the same.
Contrary to Rosedale’s views, veteran game designer Raph Koster believes that VR trolling will in fact get worse. Koster has designed a number of online games including Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online, and more recently, Crowfall. In a keynote delivered during the recently concluded GDC conference, he says that, “If anything, the behavior now is better than it will ever be,” and that trolling becomes more of a problem the more people there are because they “feel more anonymous”.
In addition, Koster says that, “When you get strangers bumping up against one another they behave more poorly,” and that, “Peer pressure is one of the things that keeps people behaving well.” He also advised VR companies to act more aggressively against bad user behavior in addition to the defensive tools they implemented.
People who think "anonymity" is "more authentic" forget that we are social creatures; we are less human when masked and isolate.
— Raph Koster (@raphkoster) March 14, 2017
Check out some interesting VR market data in the GDC video below, or watch Raph Koster’s GDC presentation in his official site. You can also read the full article over at MIT Technology Review.
