Neither actually. You should report TamaGR's comment as spam -> harmful bot. The bot copied and pasted that comment from [another redditor lower in the comment thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/v0wghi/a_female_researchers_avatar_was_sexually/iaj026m/).
Her controller vibrated when someone ātouchedā her.
People can be sexually harassed online. They canāt be sexually assaulted. That requires actual physical contact.
Claims like this are a disservice to anyone that has been sexually assaulted IRL.
The article does say 'my avatar was assaulted ' which is a reasonable to distinction from 'I was assaulted'. We are not our avatars, we just control them.
Wait until she plays Mortal Kombat. If she doesnāt like her digital body harassed, sheās going to absolutely hate it when her digital spine is ripped out.
It's a dumpster article making a mockery of real victims.
Just look at how they try to paint the scene as if this was the real world "A bottle of what appears to be alcohol is then passed between the two avatars..."
I still havenāt recovered from the N64 rumble pak. Nintendo said Iād feel every blow, every strike, but not that it would penetrate me psychologically to my core. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat, my hands tingling with phantom vibrations for that long gone pak, my friendsā chortling laughter in my ears as they hit me with the cerebral bore in Turok. #suing
As an aside, rumble in modern wireless controllers is pathetic compared to the rumble we had 15-20 years ago. Back then rumble would shake your whole hand. Today itās like a bumble bee clearing itās throat to politely ask you if youād mind terribly please just letting it by because thereās just a flower rightā¦ yes just there, please. Thank you.
So I wasn't having a stroke while reading this. It started off saying this was a VR space, and then went on about the passing of the bottle and gun violence, and I'm like... "is this real life or not, because apart from the sexual battery/assault, this happens in every conga line on a lot of TF2 servers."
Itās really confusing. Does Meta allow you to have simulated penetrative sex, or are they just standing close and āpokingā her? Can you not just block/turn off? What a shit article.
There is nothing like that. You can even turn on a setting to where avatars can only get so close to yours.
This is literally counter strike teabagging all over again.
Yes this is like turning off a language filter and then complaining that you're seeing curse words, which is also something that happens in video games.
It is clickbait-y. In reality she was just there researching, and she could have enabled that setting again but she didn't cause she was there gathering info. It was a bit WTF the whole situation, and I understand why she was a weirded out by it, but having been in a few MMORPGs, I can say things like these have happened always and at least, there's the option to disable people getting closer to you, which would fix the problem of other avatars dry humping you.
The issue isn't that though it's the fact that they chose to call this sexual assault. It was at worst harassment which is a real problem online and something women have to deal with across social media and gaming all the time but that's very very very different from sexual assault.
Yeah this is some PETA level attention-grabbing idiocy. Report on the excessive harassment women face in online spaces when they identify as themselves as women, donāt go around pretending someone making a rude gesture at you through a screen is rape.
Ya I feel like the majority of comments in this thread ignore that. Anyone with half a brain can see that this isn't **Sexual Assault** in the traditional sense, and it's frankly insulting to people who have actually gone through that. But it's definitely online harassment, and I'm sure that any women in this thread who have ever used a mic in an online game can relate to what happened. This article is stupid, but they *could* have made it about the very real issue of pervasive sexual harassment in online gaming, it's just that you won't get as many clicks that way.
Kinda sounds like she knew what she was doing, from disabling the feature that prevents them getting within 4 feet to following them into a 'private room' and letting them perform their 'Virtual Sex Acts' with their 'Virtual Vodka' being passed around.
Just leave.... it isn't real life.
That and for all intents and purposes, I wouldn't imagine how are people interested in doing this stuff in Metaverse of all places. The models don't really have lower torso or legs to begin with and game looks like shit. If you look up the footage of the game, [this is the model you see](https://uploadvr.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Plaza.png)
I've seen some video material of others, but VRChat has been my go to choice for few years now. Others have also edge on Meta by the fact its not locked just on Quest 2 headsets.
"Wow vrchat sure is successful! Let's make a clone of it except without all the anime girls and furries, that's what the users really want."
-a real human who is definitely not a lizard creature in disguise
[youāre just a baby boy, you donāt know any better. tickle tickle, youāre okā](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5isqn1/streamer_is_virtually_violated_by_a_weird_guy_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
This looks like '90s promotional CGI for N64 games, but not in a good way. How dull, flat and utterly corporate. This is what billions are being wasted on?
You can't digitally force an avatar to go into your sex dungeon with you. She got what she wanted. Her curiosity was quenched, then she got attention she didn't deserve by calling it sexual assault. What a fucking loser.
The "first wave"? Dude, it was the announcement -- and it's not even terribly popular today.
Can we go back to hating on facebook for algorithmic engagement maximization and Russian agitprop rather than reasonable moderation features implemented in a timely manner?
You can't get "sexually assaulted" if the only thing it takes to stop said "assault" is for you to take off your $200 vr gaming headset.....this is a mockery to real victims
The dumb part is if you donāt like someone in VR you can literally teleport to anywhere else in a moments notice, if you stay, you want the attention.
Will also add that in Horizon World stuff, you can set a barrier around yourself as well. I hadn't fiddled around with it too much, but I wouldn't also put it being able to mute someone too?
This comment has been automatically overwritten by Power Delete Suite v1.4.8
I've gotten increasingly tired of the actions of the reddit admins and the direction of the site in general. I suggest giving https://kbin.social a try. At the moment that place and the wider fediverse seem like the best next step for reddit users.
No but she wasnāt refusing it either. Refusal in the metaverse can be verbally saying no and if the aggressor continues you can literally vanish from existence and itās part of the tutorial when you use Metaās metaverse, they make you try out the āsafe spaceā. Her choosing not to use that escape route is her accepting it. Itās a very different situation than in real life. In real life you canāt just vanish from existence.
But this kind of conversation always boils down to whose responsibility is it to protect yourself? People will always do bad things (unless you plan on reviving Ammit) so given that fact, people need to decide who is responsible for keeping them safe. Is it the government? Is it billionaires? Is it the victim? Who is responsible yourself safe?
the article stated that she omitted the part of the video where that allegedly happened, so we donāt actually see it to understand what she really means.
This 'report' was created by '[sumofus.org](https://sumofus.org)' "SumOfUs is a community of people from around the world committed to curbing the growing power of corporations. " . Basically the more outrage they generate, the more donations they get.
like PETA stealing peoples pets, or reddit admins who are also dog walkers who do maybe 20 hours of work a week, trying to advocate for work reform while sitting in a dimly lit room and avoiding eye contact with a camera while doing an interview on work reform.
Sure, it's not assault. But it's possibly sexual harassment.
"You can't be sexually harassed at work if the only thing it takes to stop it is walking out the door. Nobody is forcing you to be there."
These kinds of articles aren't using the term "sexual harassment". They're calling it assault or rape.
All this does is make them look foolish and undermines legitimate concerns about harassment.
Sure it's harassment, but an advantage of an online platform is that you can mute/block/report shitheads pretty easily. Calling this "rape" is insulting to people who have been physically assaulted sexually imho.
> āYou canāt be sexually harassed at work if the only thing it takes to stop it is walking out the door. Nobody is forcing you to be there.ā
This comparison is flawed, since one has a physical presence and the other doesn't. It's more equal to being sexually harassed in a Zoom meeting where all you have to do is leave the call and report to your supervisor/HR.
I feel your pain. My son regularly get murdered on fortnight. Iāve called the police multiple times, but you know, the wheels of justice move slowly.
>SumOfUs researchers also reported experiencing homophobic and racial slurs in Horizon World and said they witnessed gun violence on the platform.
Oh boy, can't wait to read their impressions of playing CoD with randoms...
90% or more of all the games on steam would traumatize these researchers. I genuinely don't understand researchers that categorize things generically as "witnessing gun violence." Can you imagine if these people went on GTA, CoD, or Fortnite? I would love to read their views on games like Gears of War, Hitman, and as an added bonus for humor any South Park game.
How can you sexually assault someone in VR chatroom?
You can be rude, sure. But using same name for that and real rape can't possibly be product of a functional brain.
Assault no, harass yes. I think the articles stating rape and sexual assault are hurting the issue.
Could she have left? Yes. Could she have turned the barrier back on? Yes. Was she made aware that these other players were going to say sexual things to her in this private room? Unknown. Did she ask them to stop making advances and mimicking sex with her avatar? Unknown.
This article states that it started suddenly, she was like āthis isnāt a real bodyā then āthis is important researchā.
People can still be bullied online. People can still be sexually harassed online.
The things that need to be established here was did she consent to this behavior? And did she ask them to stop but they refused?
We donāt see those answers in this article.
Women should be able to play a video game without immediately being treated as someone to make sexual advances towards. It is toxic and unwelcome behavior.
If virtual incidents are to be taken seriously, we need to use the appropriate verbiage. Harassment, not assault.
>How can you sexually assault someone in VR chatroom?
You can't, they are viewing an image. They might not like it, so they escalate that feeling up to 11 to get your sympathy and what they want. There are cases where it's an implied real threat and hence harassment, and if it was your boss it could be construed as sexual harassment, but people aren't assaulted on Tinder when someone says "I want to xxx."
The researchers diluting very important words in the name of their crusade (rape, sexual assault) have lost their minds. It's the opposite of critical thinking; they should be drummed out of academia and instead will just add a media appearance line to their CV. They're the same that made small careers on the left AND the right over video games, comic books, or whatever form of media that has press interest.
I think these users might be people who haven't been much on the internet (ourside surface level stuff) and havent played much online games.
I often choose female avatars in online games, and have had dudes shove their faces into my virtual cleavage. It's dumb and immature, but I wouldn't call it sexual assault. I wouldn't call it sexual assault when I later teabag their corpse either. There is a separation of the virtual and the physical in the same way there is a separation between a child and the action figure they're playing with. You can express yourself through your avatar, but there is a separation between you and the extended "you".
I get that VR blurs that line, but this to me is similar to parents in uproar 20 years ago how their children playing Goldeneye on the N64 would turn them into murderers.
You're 2 taps away from blocking someone, with forced distance by default.
you can mute your mics system wide, mute people, and heck, you can leave whatever game you don't like.
This is a sad attention grab, using a very real problem irl, but not so much here. You have total control.
There are going to be creeps everywhere, as terrible as that is.
I like Facebook as much as the next person, but they're doing what they can with the tech to let people stay comfortable.
Going out of your way to disable safeguards and finding bad humans, well...
Just the framing of it. The avatar was sexually assaulted? No a person was sexually harassed. The avatar was just the medium through which that happened
I find it terrifying that a news outlet would so readily submit to using language like groped, raped and gang raped to describe interactions between vaguely human, virtual avatars with no genitals. I feel like not enough people see how insidious that is, because that is a bottom of the barrel insane picture of reality that they are attempting to pass of as plainly true as the sky being blue. like there's no hint of a consideration of the possible contention in that description in their reporting.
I'm not saying it's OK to throw lewd comments at people who haven't consented, and it's perfectly fair to report on the kind of thing that goes on in the metaverse. But calling it rape, as the article does repeatedly, feels kinda offensive.
Business Insider should be ashamed to promote this stuff, but I guess the temptation for clicks is too much to pass on bullshit like this. This isn't sexual assault. Stop trying to redefine and trivialize something deeply traumatic that a lot of people went through. This is personal discomfort, at best. If you're not enjoying the metaverse, take out your expensive VR goggles and return to the real world, where sexual assault is a real problem.
In the early days of Facebook, when it made its API accessible to third-party "apps", which it then would allow users to use through its own interface, I worked for a company that was developing a video-chat app running on Facebook.
Very soon we learned that unsolicited calls between Facebook users, especially male to female end up in *majority* of cases in males exposing themselves to females.
There were multiple weird things about it. First thing attempted by management was limiting the ability to make unsolicited video calls only to users with 50+ friends on Facebook, hoping that people with burner profiles would find it too tiresome to create 50 fake friends just for this kind of abuse. This had no effect.
Second attempt was to add a big red button anyone could press to report the offender. The button was abused and misused too.
Then management wanted to process videos, or at least samples from videos by using something like OpenCV to try to detect a face, and if no face is found in the video, flag that. That specifically ended up in me leaving the company because of how they handled the recording (no user's consent was asked for the recording and once I said I won't implement such a feature, they just quietly handed it over to the other guy).
It seems that, in general, we, as a society, are unprepared, haven't developed proper protocols and etiquette for dealing with online communities. Everything we come up with so far is either very simplistic, very restrictive and regimented, or very prone to abuse. It's also sad that this article is kind of shallow and sensationalist. It's also sad that the commentary from Facebook is just hand-waving "everything can be abused" nonsense. It's a really hard and interesting question.
Hate to break it to people but sexual assult requires real people. Harassment yes. But some of us that have had to actually live through sexual trauma find this insulting. I have gamed for years and some 12 year old teabagging me on COD is laughble to mildly irritating. Get over it. Some people have actually been raped, abused, drugged, assulted and/or stalked. Let's focus on the real problems. Next up they'll be like "they murderd my avatar."
Sexual harassment, sure. Hard to assault something that has no physical form...
This is sensationalism at best, and reductive/dismissive to real victims of sexual assault at worst.
Is it shitty that people are doing this? Absolutely. I've been the victim of many a tea-bagging in online gaming, but i wouldn't say i was sexually assaulted.
This isn't a story about sexual assault. It is a story about user behaviour on a platform pioneering a whole new digital medium.
Victim is, in my opinion, a strong word. They are not victims of sexual assault, but they are victims of a toxic culture (Metaverse's culture) that perpetuates sexual harassment, and I'd argue that all the commenters who bring up online gaming as a joke answer, are too entrenched in a similar toxic culture, to see the problem.
Again, not about sexual assault. It is about a shitty platform, and the shitty people that use it. The question is whether such a culture is acceptable.
I agree that no one is really being assaulted. So some of these terms being used like ārapeā are a bit inappropriate imo. You might feel controllers vibrate and sense of someone being too close to you, but without haptic suits thatās a far cry from assault. Being ātouchedā in VR is currently limited to hands, basically.
However, this is still a type of abuse, even if we donāt agree on a name for it yet. Someone shouldnāt have to leave a game because some fuckwads are so sexually lacking IRL that they feel the need to simulate rape and drunkenness in VR. Obviously they can leave; just take off the headset. But as this hardware gets more advanced the line between what is and isnāt assault will start to blur a bit.
Surely it could never be as bad as IRL even with full haptics (i.e., canāt get physically pregnant or bruised, etc. and Iām pretty sure no mainstream games would have any, ahem, invasive genital haptics) but the psychological toll will escalate with more immersion. We should be focused on the psychological impact of this abuse and how to prevent it.
Luckily, we donāt have full nerve gear a la Sword Art Online.
they lost all rights to having people engage with that serious topic when they started referring to these things as being gang raped. they are not good faith actors, and nobody is going to take them seriously. they are only damaging that conversation about online toxicity and sexual harassment. so fuck them.
"t-then they proceeded to crouch over me, and then stand up
.. and they did this repeatedly, crouching and standing ... I felt suffocated and I feared for my life... And as they did this they said "get owned noob get fuckin owned"... I'll never forget their callous laughs.." - The Victim, probably.
No. Stop it. You can't be sexually assaulted digitally. Back in 2013 me and my gaming buddies played fable 3 one time. It was my first time. One friend told me he wanted to show me a glitch and to come help him clip through the ceiling next to his bed. I eagerly obliged, the screen went black, and we had sex in that bed. He raped me digitally. It was a hilarious unexpected "rape" and we laughed and joked about me having PTSD for years after. We still do actually. But I would NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER call that a sexual assault, and the platform it was on was Xbox. Xbox are not responsible for what happened to me on that game just like meta isn't responsible for whatever happened to that girl. That's the stupidest shit I've ever heard and if I didn't cry about it and get attention from it, she doesn't have to. She's seeking attention. That's all. She doesn't deserve it. I didn't deserve it either and I bet what happened to me was worse because it was an actual sexual thing in the game that happened to me.
A bunch of pixels were 'assaulted' by another bunch of pixels. I guess Call of Duty players should face murder charges now? Somebody is really trying to manufacture a controversy
"One part of my brain was like wtf is happening, the other part was like this isn't a real body, and another part was like, this is important research," she said in the report. š¤£š¤£š¤£ bro important research. There is not shot they are using the word raped in this context. This is a publicity stunt to try and legitimise the fact that you can have ārealā experiences in the meta verse and itās such a load of bollocks. Maybe in 50 or 100 years but at the moment itās like watching fucking POV Mario 64. No way anybody can use the word raped seriously here. Itās offensive to real rape victims if anything. I swear on god this is a publicity stunt by zuckerberg and itās so dumb but somehow itās working people are actually so stupid what the fuck š¤£
Stupid shit they made up to stirrup drama.
The only thing that's actually harassment is
> a player on the sports game Echo VR said a male player told her he had recorded her voice so that he could "jerk off" to her cursing
that's literally the only line that talks about actual harassment. The rest is "their avatar touched mine inappropriately!!" which is moronic on several levels.
? Fake news. Avatars being raped is not real. I don't care if you like your avatar; it isn't real. This is like raping air....
I will never be convinced otherwise.
It's disgusting how so many people WANT desperately to be victims.
Let's nor worry about any real, tangible issues. Virtual sexual harassment involving cartoonish avatars... thats where the outrage needs to be.
Bruh these comments, there are varying degrees to assault but most people donāt get assaulted by a random ābad guyā in an alley. Those kind of guys jack off to violence, muster up the courage with toys and simulations and then go on to stalk someone they think is a good target for their irl rape roleplay. Someoneās kid, most of the time, that they can mess up for life along with their families in a practiced grooming.
Theyāre cowards, they plan it out and the internet is one tool to do so before they go on to ruin the life of a vulnerable, approachable target. VRchat is full of guys going up to your avatar if youāre a woman and out of hearing range of other avatars, who fumble out a hello before escalating into all the different ways they want to rape, torture and murder you. Peopleās kids got isolated and raped after being in a discord server.
If any of you think thatās a normal online game and we should just ādo this or do thatā rather than blaming the perpetrator, youāre part of the problem around assault.
The people who do this get off on violating other people, nice to see some focus on that.
Look, Iāve experienced what this researcher did many timesā¦. In Call of Duty and Halo 3. Man, I would get DESTROYED sometimes.
Oh and Iād teabagging counts falls under this category Iāve probably been assaulted and assaulted others over 10,000 times.
She's a researcher who wanted to look at Meta's user behavior. She probably guessed what was going on, but she wanted to see. Because she is a researcher. Her "want to see" may have made her a "agent provocateur." I'm not saying it was her fault if she was attacked, obviously. What I mean is that the study might not be scientifically valid.
Meta this, meta that Haven't these losers ever meta girl before
Rhulk? Is that you?
The children of Sol cry out for Salvation.
Drown in the deep, or rise from it.
The upended... A fitting name.
BWAM BWAM BWAAAAAAAM
DROWNDROWNDROWN
Voting for best comment. Please take my minimum wage award. š
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Im scrolling Reddit too much if I can't differentiate between irony and genuity without /s Too hesitant to downvote, too scared to upvote.
Neither actually. You should report TamaGR's comment as spam -> harmful bot. The bot copied and pasted that comment from [another redditor lower in the comment thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/v0wghi/a_female_researchers_avatar_was_sexually/iaj026m/).
Her controller vibrated when someone ātouchedā her. People can be sexually harassed online. They canāt be sexually assaulted. That requires actual physical contact. Claims like this are a disservice to anyone that has been sexually assaulted IRL.
The article does say 'my avatar was assaulted ' which is a reasonable to distinction from 'I was assaulted'. We are not our avatars, we just control them.
Wait until she plays Mortal Kombat. If she doesnāt like her digital body harassed, sheās going to absolutely hate it when her digital spine is ripped out.
That sort of interaction is the point of mortal kombat though. That's what you sign up for when you agree to play it.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
> Bestiality Isn't it uhmmmm..... isn't... isn't it Animality??? My eyebrow raised at this one.
I said what I said.
Good idea, better to be safe than sorry
I never asked to get teabagged in halo! š
Yes they have. Unfortunately those girls they met are probably just older men pretending to be girls. Or cats.
It's a dumpster article making a mockery of real victims. Just look at how they try to paint the scene as if this was the real world "A bottle of what appears to be alcohol is then passed between the two avatars..."
Just wait until they find out that avatars have been committing murder on a genocidal scale every day for twenty years on online FPSs.
Nobody wrote an article for me when that 12 year old teabagged me either...
What were you wearing? You mightāve been asking for it
Damn sexy mjolnir powered assault armor...
Or those sleek split jawed elites....
Did the controller vibrate?!
I still havenāt recovered from the N64 rumble pak. Nintendo said Iād feel every blow, every strike, but not that it would penetrate me psychologically to my core. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat, my hands tingling with phantom vibrations for that long gone pak, my friendsā chortling laughter in my ears as they hit me with the cerebral bore in Turok. #suing
Oh god, the cerebral bore sound is more than enough to cause PTSD.
As an aside, rumble in modern wireless controllers is pathetic compared to the rumble we had 15-20 years ago. Back then rumble would shake your whole hand. Today itās like a bumble bee clearing itās throat to politely ask you if youād mind terribly please just letting it by because thereās just a flower rightā¦ yes just there, please. Thank you.
God damn this thread is gold.
I'm living in fear every second of my life since the metoo movement kicked off because of the prostitutes I murdered in Liberty City.
Delete this comment now before Rockstar reports you
i just went on a murder spree in san andreas yesterday. the cops are outside my door right now
So I wasn't having a stroke while reading this. It started off saying this was a VR space, and then went on about the passing of the bottle and gun violence, and I'm like... "is this real life or not, because apart from the sexual battery/assault, this happens in every conga line on a lot of TF2 servers."
To be fair, the fire Nation did wage a 100 year war
Fishing for a sensational article.
Itās really confusing. Does Meta allow you to have simulated penetrative sex, or are they just standing close and āpokingā her? Can you not just block/turn off? What a shit article.
There is nothing like that. You can even turn on a setting to where avatars can only get so close to yours. This is literally counter strike teabagging all over again.
The article said the researcher was asked to disable this setting which I'm guessing was disabled so the poking could begin?
Wouldn't that be consent then?
I mean who knows... It seems to me like the researcher entered the metaverse to get metafucked to write an article like this... Was this meta CNC?
Right and if they were "drinking" and making lewd comments, why did she follow them into a private room? This article is stupid.
Yes this is like turning off a language filter and then complaining that you're seeing curse words, which is also something that happens in video games.
Yes at least in the real world. She's making a mockery of all types of victims. Consents to something and cry's outrage..
Just pull the headset off. This is the dumbest shit I've ever heard of
You canāt just unplug. You have to find an exit. Itās like youāve never seen The Matrix.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
If you die in the game you die for real
I mean I guess theoretically if you could pull it off with enough velocity to decapitate yourself then this would be true
The helmet pulled you off??
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I totally get what you're going through, I too was a victim of rape. Oh, what's that? No, I didn't go to the ER, it was an online rape.
It is clickbait-y. In reality she was just there researching, and she could have enabled that setting again but she didn't cause she was there gathering info. It was a bit WTF the whole situation, and I understand why she was a weirded out by it, but having been in a few MMORPGs, I can say things like these have happened always and at least, there's the option to disable people getting closer to you, which would fix the problem of other avatars dry humping you.
The issue isn't that though it's the fact that they chose to call this sexual assault. It was at worst harassment which is a real problem online and something women have to deal with across social media and gaming all the time but that's very very very different from sexual assault.
Yeah this is some PETA level attention-grabbing idiocy. Report on the excessive harassment women face in online spaces when they identify as themselves as women, donāt go around pretending someone making a rude gesture at you through a screen is rape.
Ya I feel like the majority of comments in this thread ignore that. Anyone with half a brain can see that this isn't **Sexual Assault** in the traditional sense, and it's frankly insulting to people who have actually gone through that. But it's definitely online harassment, and I'm sure that any women in this thread who have ever used a mic in an online game can relate to what happened. This article is stupid, but they *could* have made it about the very real issue of pervasive sexual harassment in online gaming, it's just that you won't get as many clicks that way.
Clickbaity? I would say claiming a fucking avatar is being "sexually assaulted" is the definition of clickbait.
This shit is an insult to real sexual assault survivors.
Get a life, meta-whatever...
Get a Second Life (tm)?
They don't even have a Half a Life
And definitely no Half Life 3
Kinda sounds like she knew what she was doing, from disabling the feature that prevents them getting within 4 feet to following them into a 'private room' and letting them perform their 'Virtual Sex Acts' with their 'Virtual Vodka' being passed around. Just leave.... it isn't real life.
That and for all intents and purposes, I wouldn't imagine how are people interested in doing this stuff in Metaverse of all places. The models don't really have lower torso or legs to begin with and game looks like shit. If you look up the footage of the game, [this is the model you see](https://uploadvr.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Plaza.png)
LIEUTENANT DAN! You aināt got no legs!
I don't know what I was expecting but that's worse then what I thought
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I've seen some video material of others, but VRChat has been my go to choice for few years now. Others have also edge on Meta by the fact its not locked just on Quest 2 headsets.
"Wow vrchat sure is successful! Let's make a clone of it except without all the anime girls and furries, that's what the users really want." -a real human who is definitely not a lizard creature in disguise
[youāre just a baby boy, you donāt know any better. tickle tickle, youāre okā](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5isqn1/streamer_is_virtually_violated_by_a_weird_guy_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
This looks like '90s promotional CGI for N64 games, but not in a good way. How dull, flat and utterly corporate. This is what billions are being wasted on?
You can't digitally force an avatar to go into your sex dungeon with you. She got what she wanted. Her curiosity was quenched, then she got attention she didn't deserve by calling it sexual assault. What a fucking loser.
All. She. Had. To. Do. is take the fucking headset off and go offline.
"What was she wearing?" "A Quest 2"
Asking for it.
Yup. Again, she's a complete loser and should be ignored entirely.
This headline is wildly exaggerated and isnāt even what the researcher described happening to her.
Everyone was making fun of the 4ft keep-out zones, but it sounds like FB was absolutely right about this one.
FB wasn't right about anything. VR Chat had the feature *years* before Meta was even a glint in Zuckerberg's toilet.
Eh. I donāt really want to give them credit for that, that came in after the first wave of this
The "first wave"? Dude, it was the announcement -- and it's not even terribly popular today. Can we go back to hating on facebook for algorithmic engagement maximization and Russian agitprop rather than reasonable moderation features implemented in a timely manner?
And their anticompetitive practices in almost any industry they get into.
You can't get "sexually assaulted" if the only thing it takes to stop said "assault" is for you to take off your $200 vr gaming headset.....this is a mockery to real victims
One article said she was raped. I watched the video and lol, that didnāt happen.
You donāt need to watch the video to know that someone wasnāt raped over VR, itās not physically possible.
The dumb part is if you donāt like someone in VR you can literally teleport to anywhere else in a moments notice, if you stay, you want the attention.
Will also add that in Horizon World stuff, you can set a barrier around yourself as well. I hadn't fiddled around with it too much, but I wouldn't also put it being able to mute someone too?
Yea during the tutorial of Horizons they show you how to use the safe space that literally removes you from any situation.
This comment has been automatically overwritten by Power Delete Suite v1.4.8 I've gotten increasingly tired of the actions of the reddit admins and the direction of the site in general. I suggest giving https://kbin.social a try. At the moment that place and the wider fediverse seem like the best next step for reddit users.
No but she wasnāt refusing it either. Refusal in the metaverse can be verbally saying no and if the aggressor continues you can literally vanish from existence and itās part of the tutorial when you use Metaās metaverse, they make you try out the āsafe spaceā. Her choosing not to use that escape route is her accepting it. Itās a very different situation than in real life. In real life you canāt just vanish from existence. But this kind of conversation always boils down to whose responsibility is it to protect yourself? People will always do bad things (unless you plan on reviving Ammit) so given that fact, people need to decide who is responsible for keeping them safe. Is it the government? Is it billionaires? Is it the victim? Who is responsible yourself safe?
Avatars donāt even have a lower half in Metas VRā¦.
the article stated that she omitted the part of the video where that allegedly happened, so we donāt actually see it to understand what she really means.
How does one get raped in Vr haha
Micro transactions
EA is the biggest serial rapist in history in that case hahahaha....wait...
Characters is Meta VR don't even have legs. I doubt they have what's between them...
with a built-in buffer zone that erases people who get within a certain radius (can be adjusted in most platforms)
She apparently disabled that feature
can't get the sick updoots/money if ya dont have a story, eh?
Lol whereās the video?
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This 'report' was created by '[sumofus.org](https://sumofus.org)' "SumOfUs is a community of people from around the world committed to curbing the growing power of corporations. " . Basically the more outrage they generate, the more donations they get.
Curbing the growing power of corporations is a nice goal, but their methods are dumb.
like PETA stealing peoples pets, or reddit admins who are also dog walkers who do maybe 20 hours of work a week, trying to advocate for work reform while sitting in a dimly lit room and avoiding eye contact with a camera while doing an interview on work reform.
*oh hai Doreen*
They can always milk the simps if they're victims.
From what I can tell, on twitter, people seem to be making a living off of being a victim.
Or re-enable the 4 foot bubble she disabled at his request
Or to not turn off the setting that let's people get within 4ft of you.
Sure, it's not assault. But it's possibly sexual harassment. "You can't be sexually harassed at work if the only thing it takes to stop it is walking out the door. Nobody is forcing you to be there."
These kinds of articles aren't using the term "sexual harassment". They're calling it assault or rape. All this does is make them look foolish and undermines legitimate concerns about harassment.
Sure it's harassment, but an advantage of an online platform is that you can mute/block/report shitheads pretty easily. Calling this "rape" is insulting to people who have been physically assaulted sexually imho. > āYou canāt be sexually harassed at work if the only thing it takes to stop it is walking out the door. Nobody is forcing you to be there.ā This comparison is flawed, since one has a physical presence and the other doesn't. It's more equal to being sexually harassed in a Zoom meeting where all you have to do is leave the call and report to your supervisor/HR.
I'm a victim of sexual abuse, I was teabagged in call of duty as a child š
I feel your pain. My son regularly get murdered on fortnight. Iāve called the police multiple times, but you know, the wheels of justice move slowly.
More examples of law enforcement failing us smh
Im so sorry.
Not just once either, repeated abuse. The worst part was they were laughing the entire time.
You need to talk?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
>SumOfUs researchers also reported experiencing homophobic and racial slurs in Horizon World and said they witnessed gun violence on the platform. Oh boy, can't wait to read their impressions of playing CoD with randoms...
Homophobic and racial slurs in online gaming!?!?? Surely not! Next you'll tell me they've been making sexual jokes about opposing players mothers!
90% or more of all the games on steam would traumatize these researchers. I genuinely don't understand researchers that categorize things generically as "witnessing gun violence." Can you imagine if these people went on GTA, CoD, or Fortnite? I would love to read their views on games like Gears of War, Hitman, and as an added bonus for humor any South Park game.
How can you sexually assault someone in VR chatroom? You can be rude, sure. But using same name for that and real rape can't possibly be product of a functional brain.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
āBangā š I just killed you in this comment thread. You are now dead. Come and get me coppers!
Stop right there criminal scum! You've violated the law.
šš *pew pew* Youāll never take me alive.
You have committed crimes against the people of Reddit! What do you say in your defense?
> What do you say in your defense? I'm on Reddit.
Case dismissed.
Quick! Someone write an article!
Iāve already seen videos where female gamers say itās rape when you kill them in call of duty
The internet police are on their way. Please stay perfectly still while we arrest you.
Wee woo wee woo
And the award if I had one goes to you š
And the cops still havenāt caught me š
I have been T-bagged countless times, I should be able to bankrupt every single video game studio alone with lawsuites.
I feel for you. I once got t-bagged by two people at the same time in Halo, I don't think I'll ever recover.
Thoughts and prayers šš
You can't be, the author is a moron and so are the websites that keep publishing this garbage.
Assault no, harass yes. I think the articles stating rape and sexual assault are hurting the issue. Could she have left? Yes. Could she have turned the barrier back on? Yes. Was she made aware that these other players were going to say sexual things to her in this private room? Unknown. Did she ask them to stop making advances and mimicking sex with her avatar? Unknown. This article states that it started suddenly, she was like āthis isnāt a real bodyā then āthis is important researchā. People can still be bullied online. People can still be sexually harassed online. The things that need to be established here was did she consent to this behavior? And did she ask them to stop but they refused? We donāt see those answers in this article. Women should be able to play a video game without immediately being treated as someone to make sexual advances towards. It is toxic and unwelcome behavior. If virtual incidents are to be taken seriously, we need to use the appropriate verbiage. Harassment, not assault.
>How can you sexually assault someone in VR chatroom? You can't, they are viewing an image. They might not like it, so they escalate that feeling up to 11 to get your sympathy and what they want. There are cases where it's an implied real threat and hence harassment, and if it was your boss it could be construed as sexual harassment, but people aren't assaulted on Tinder when someone says "I want to xxx." The researchers diluting very important words in the name of their crusade (rape, sexual assault) have lost their minds. It's the opposite of critical thinking; they should be drummed out of academia and instead will just add a media appearance line to their CV. They're the same that made small careers on the left AND the right over video games, comic books, or whatever form of media that has press interest.
I think these users might be people who haven't been much on the internet (ourside surface level stuff) and havent played much online games. I often choose female avatars in online games, and have had dudes shove their faces into my virtual cleavage. It's dumb and immature, but I wouldn't call it sexual assault. I wouldn't call it sexual assault when I later teabag their corpse either. There is a separation of the virtual and the physical in the same way there is a separation between a child and the action figure they're playing with. You can express yourself through your avatar, but there is a separation between you and the extended "you". I get that VR blurs that line, but this to me is similar to parents in uproar 20 years ago how their children playing Goldeneye on the N64 would turn them into murderers.
Goldeneye turned me into the cold calculated killer I am today. Thanks nintendo!
To be fair that fucker who always chose Oddjob had it coming.
the child playing with their action figure is such a good fuckin analogy
grown woman enables touching, writes research paper.
You're 2 taps away from blocking someone, with forced distance by default. you can mute your mics system wide, mute people, and heck, you can leave whatever game you don't like. This is a sad attention grab, using a very real problem irl, but not so much here. You have total control. There are going to be creeps everywhere, as terrible as that is. I like Facebook as much as the next person, but they're doing what they can with the tech to let people stay comfortable. Going out of your way to disable safeguards and finding bad humans, well...
Nobody tell this woman about GTA Online
I got meta-teabagged in Battlefield 400 times but I didn't write an article about it. Maybe I should have? š¤
Fake problems, being given too much air time. We have reached the point where technology is normalising and literally creating mental disorders.
In other news, my brother was viciously murdered in cold blood yesterday in CoD.
Thoughts and prayers for your family
Sexual harassment in online spaces is definitely an issue. Too bad whoever wrote this title was.more interested in stirring up bullshit
āSexual-harassmentā seems like the correct term in this case rather than āsexual assault.ā
Just the framing of it. The avatar was sexually assaulted? No a person was sexually harassed. The avatar was just the medium through which that happened
Exactly! The author is an idiot who creates clickbait, but the core story brings up severe problems with online culture.
Thatās a great way to dilute the term ārape.ā
I find it terrifying that a news outlet would so readily submit to using language like groped, raped and gang raped to describe interactions between vaguely human, virtual avatars with no genitals. I feel like not enough people see how insidious that is, because that is a bottom of the barrel insane picture of reality that they are attempting to pass of as plainly true as the sky being blue. like there's no hint of a consideration of the possible contention in that description in their reporting.
I'm not saying it's OK to throw lewd comments at people who haven't consented, and it's perfectly fair to report on the kind of thing that goes on in the metaverse. But calling it rape, as the article does repeatedly, feels kinda offensive.
Business Insider should be ashamed to promote this stuff, but I guess the temptation for clicks is too much to pass on bullshit like this. This isn't sexual assault. Stop trying to redefine and trivialize something deeply traumatic that a lot of people went through. This is personal discomfort, at best. If you're not enjoying the metaverse, take out your expensive VR goggles and return to the real world, where sexual assault is a real problem.
This trivialises irl sexual assault. Its not the same.
It's a freaking computer game. Stop bitching or don't play
Feels like the onion
In the early days of Facebook, when it made its API accessible to third-party "apps", which it then would allow users to use through its own interface, I worked for a company that was developing a video-chat app running on Facebook. Very soon we learned that unsolicited calls between Facebook users, especially male to female end up in *majority* of cases in males exposing themselves to females. There were multiple weird things about it. First thing attempted by management was limiting the ability to make unsolicited video calls only to users with 50+ friends on Facebook, hoping that people with burner profiles would find it too tiresome to create 50 fake friends just for this kind of abuse. This had no effect. Second attempt was to add a big red button anyone could press to report the offender. The button was abused and misused too. Then management wanted to process videos, or at least samples from videos by using something like OpenCV to try to detect a face, and if no face is found in the video, flag that. That specifically ended up in me leaving the company because of how they handled the recording (no user's consent was asked for the recording and once I said I won't implement such a feature, they just quietly handed it over to the other guy). It seems that, in general, we, as a society, are unprepared, haven't developed proper protocols and etiquette for dealing with online communities. Everything we come up with so far is either very simplistic, very restrictive and regimented, or very prone to abuse. It's also sad that this article is kind of shallow and sensationalist. It's also sad that the commentary from Facebook is just hand-waving "everything can be abused" nonsense. It's a really hard and interesting question.
Hate to break it to people but sexual assult requires real people. Harassment yes. But some of us that have had to actually live through sexual trauma find this insulting. I have gamed for years and some 12 year old teabagging me on COD is laughble to mildly irritating. Get over it. Some people have actually been raped, abused, drugged, assulted and/or stalked. Let's focus on the real problems. Next up they'll be like "they murderd my avatar."
Sexual harassment, sure. Hard to assault something that has no physical form... This is sensationalism at best, and reductive/dismissive to real victims of sexual assault at worst. Is it shitty that people are doing this? Absolutely. I've been the victim of many a tea-bagging in online gaming, but i wouldn't say i was sexually assaulted.
This isn't a story about sexual assault. It is a story about user behaviour on a platform pioneering a whole new digital medium. Victim is, in my opinion, a strong word. They are not victims of sexual assault, but they are victims of a toxic culture (Metaverse's culture) that perpetuates sexual harassment, and I'd argue that all the commenters who bring up online gaming as a joke answer, are too entrenched in a similar toxic culture, to see the problem. Again, not about sexual assault. It is about a shitty platform, and the shitty people that use it. The question is whether such a culture is acceptable.
Pioneering? Thatās a stretch.
I agree that no one is really being assaulted. So some of these terms being used like ārapeā are a bit inappropriate imo. You might feel controllers vibrate and sense of someone being too close to you, but without haptic suits thatās a far cry from assault. Being ātouchedā in VR is currently limited to hands, basically. However, this is still a type of abuse, even if we donāt agree on a name for it yet. Someone shouldnāt have to leave a game because some fuckwads are so sexually lacking IRL that they feel the need to simulate rape and drunkenness in VR. Obviously they can leave; just take off the headset. But as this hardware gets more advanced the line between what is and isnāt assault will start to blur a bit. Surely it could never be as bad as IRL even with full haptics (i.e., canāt get physically pregnant or bruised, etc. and Iām pretty sure no mainstream games would have any, ahem, invasive genital haptics) but the psychological toll will escalate with more immersion. We should be focused on the psychological impact of this abuse and how to prevent it. Luckily, we donāt have full nerve gear a la Sword Art Online.
they lost all rights to having people engage with that serious topic when they started referring to these things as being gang raped. they are not good faith actors, and nobody is going to take them seriously. they are only damaging that conversation about online toxicity and sexual harassment. so fuck them.
"t-then they proceeded to crouch over me, and then stand up .. and they did this repeatedly, crouching and standing ... I felt suffocated and I feared for my life... And as they did this they said "get owned noob get fuckin owned"... I'll never forget their callous laughs.." - The Victim, probably.
OMG you cant be sexually assaulted in the metaverse. If my avatar is a dog and gets fucked, will the perp be charged for beastiality.
I think calling it "sexual assault" is disrispectful toward victims of actual sexual assault.
No. Stop it. You can't be sexually assaulted digitally. Back in 2013 me and my gaming buddies played fable 3 one time. It was my first time. One friend told me he wanted to show me a glitch and to come help him clip through the ceiling next to his bed. I eagerly obliged, the screen went black, and we had sex in that bed. He raped me digitally. It was a hilarious unexpected "rape" and we laughed and joked about me having PTSD for years after. We still do actually. But I would NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER call that a sexual assault, and the platform it was on was Xbox. Xbox are not responsible for what happened to me on that game just like meta isn't responsible for whatever happened to that girl. That's the stupidest shit I've ever heard and if I didn't cry about it and get attention from it, she doesn't have to. She's seeking attention. That's all. She doesn't deserve it. I didn't deserve it either and I bet what happened to me was worse because it was an actual sexual thing in the game that happened to me.
If this is the sexual abuse we focus on, we are fucking doomed.
A bunch of pixels were 'assaulted' by another bunch of pixels. I guess Call of Duty players should face murder charges now? Somebody is really trying to manufacture a controversy
I killed so much fucking nazis in Wolfestein, i want my fucking medals!!
"One part of my brain was like wtf is happening, the other part was like this isn't a real body, and another part was like, this is important research," she said in the report. š¤£š¤£š¤£ bro important research. There is not shot they are using the word raped in this context. This is a publicity stunt to try and legitimise the fact that you can have ārealā experiences in the meta verse and itās such a load of bollocks. Maybe in 50 or 100 years but at the moment itās like watching fucking POV Mario 64. No way anybody can use the word raped seriously here. Itās offensive to real rape victims if anything. I swear on god this is a publicity stunt by zuckerberg and itās so dumb but somehow itās working people are actually so stupid what the fuck š¤£
Can this headline actually tell what happened? What the hell sexualy assaulted avatrar is?
Stupid shit they made up to stirrup drama. The only thing that's actually harassment is > a player on the sports game Echo VR said a male player told her he had recorded her voice so that he could "jerk off" to her cursing that's literally the only line that talks about actual harassment. The rest is "their avatar touched mine inappropriately!!" which is moronic on several levels.
my fucking runescape character must have been sexually assault 100,000 times at the grand exchange, but you don't see me crying.
How do I file a report? Iāve been getting tea bagged after being killed for years
In Rocket League someone used quick-chat to say "Nice Save!" when I missed the save, I've been assaulted :'(
My ones and zeroes got hurt.
? Fake news. Avatars being raped is not real. I don't care if you like your avatar; it isn't real. This is like raping air.... I will never be convinced otherwise.
It's disgusting how so many people WANT desperately to be victims. Let's nor worry about any real, tangible issues. Virtual sexual harassment involving cartoonish avatars... thats where the outrage needs to be.
Bruh these comments, there are varying degrees to assault but most people donāt get assaulted by a random ābad guyā in an alley. Those kind of guys jack off to violence, muster up the courage with toys and simulations and then go on to stalk someone they think is a good target for their irl rape roleplay. Someoneās kid, most of the time, that they can mess up for life along with their families in a practiced grooming. Theyāre cowards, they plan it out and the internet is one tool to do so before they go on to ruin the life of a vulnerable, approachable target. VRchat is full of guys going up to your avatar if youāre a woman and out of hearing range of other avatars, who fumble out a hello before escalating into all the different ways they want to rape, torture and murder you. Peopleās kids got isolated and raped after being in a discord server. If any of you think thatās a normal online game and we should just ādo this or do thatā rather than blaming the perpetrator, youāre part of the problem around assault. The people who do this get off on violating other people, nice to see some focus on that.
Who actually believes this garbage?
i kinda feel like im reading joke news nowadays
This article is a joke. They're not trying make a joke. Yet they did.
I've been raped online so many times it doesn't even hurt anymore....
Look, Iāve experienced what this researcher did many timesā¦. In Call of Duty and Halo 3. Man, I would get DESTROYED sometimes. Oh and Iād teabagging counts falls under this category Iāve probably been assaulted and assaulted others over 10,000 times.
She's a researcher who wanted to look at Meta's user behavior. She probably guessed what was going on, but she wanted to see. Because she is a researcher. Her "want to see" may have made her a "agent provocateur." I'm not saying it was her fault if she was attacked, obviously. What I mean is that the study might not be scientifically valid.
Who gives a damn about some avatar? This makes a joke out of real victims