What Dealing With Second Life Griefing Can Teach Developers of New VR Social Worlds

Facebook VR engineer Jim Purbrick hosted this recent conversation on making virtual reality social spaces safer for everyone, especially women and minorities who tend to be targeted for harassment most. Jim (he of the epic beard) is working on Facebook's avatars and VR rooms, and as I've mentioned before, much of his wisdom comes from being an engineer during Second Life's early growth phase. Joined by developers of new VR platforms Bigscreen and Altspace VR, who share their own experiences dealing with griefers and trolls, it's striking how we keep repeating a three decade-plus history of virtual world harassment. For Jim's part, there's still a lot that Second Life can teach developers of new VR-based social worlds:

"You need to consider how everything can be used to harass people (from grey goo to orbiters -- SL scripting automated a lot of harassment)," he tells me. "Just providing the functionality isn't enough: the machinery to lock down the land used for the Anshe Chung interview existed, but it wasn't easy enough to use when the flying penises arrived." (Yes, flying penii -- see NSFW video below.)

"You need to build tools that are like fire extinguishers: you should be able to ignore them for years, but still work out how to use them quickly when the fire breaks out," he adds. "Also as I mentioned in the video private spaces for learning are important: having to learn in public can be embarrassing even if no harm is intended."

Maybe this generation will finally learn from previous one, but I'm not holding my breath. Top comments to this YouTube video are typical for (male) VR enthusiasts:

"Utterly pathetic. It's depressing there's people so emotionally fragile, they need people to babysit them in a video game. Get a life you stunted babies... Fuck that, I want VR to be dangerous... Cuckulus Rift."

And so on. Which brings us to the flying penii:

Maybe funny in a juvenile way (if you're not the target of the griefing or you're not a woman) but this incident deeply damaged the Second Life brand with all the major companies interested in investing in it further. Unless systems are put in place to prevent them happening at all, similar incidents will likely contribute to a backlash against VR's new social platforms.

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Comments

[Amanda Dallin]

"Maybe this generation will finally learn from previous one, but I'm not holding my breath."

No I wouldn't hold your breath. Human nature doesn't change. We aren't better or smarter than our ancestors. We've just built our technology on top of theirs. We have better stuff but we're not better people.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

"If I pee on your head, it is because I am standing on top of my ancestors' piled corpses" -wisdom by the great barbarian Isaac Newton.

[JohnC]

I think it is pretty obvious that LL would have solved this problem by now if it were possible, they of all companies have had the greatest opportunity to do so. It would have been to their absolute benefit financially and socially to have done so. So the fact they have not obviously indicates that it is next to impossible in an on line open world. Of course you cannot say this, you must always keep on fighting like you mean to win. It is possible to have online games in which there is no griefing at all, but you get this by shrinking social interaction so much that it is not really worth having it. Anonymity is a huge part of the cause. Almost all griefers would not grief in real life. But imagine the mass exodus from SL if we were all suddenly made to wear a verified RL pic, use voice only and have or real name and address open for public view. then the griefing would stop on line. But the stalking would begin big time in RL.

[Jumpman Lane]

Ive known my fair share of griefers. They were actually as a rule kind of cool people in quieter times. However, if your were trying to do anything serious at all they became irritating as their stated goal was to disrupt your fun. The very worst griefers of all were the ones who 'carried water" for their annointed leaders. Tizzers Foxchase was actually a cool person. Her flunkies most uncool. The leaders of those furry tards of Poland were mildly amusing (when they were being orbited across a sim): yet, their gesturing flunkies were not.

As an aside the now (sadly to some) dead one-time leader of The PN was unquestionably a douche.

Linden Lab did an enviable job of breaking the organized griefer groups. Even creating such a thing as the Governance Team showed a willingness on the Lab's part to police their lil virt world. LL definitely paved the way with respect to combatting griefing in games.

[JohnC]

Anyone who has ever run a successful sim in SL, has masses of hard core experience of dealing with the griefer problem that the new wave of VR entrepreneurs will confront at some point. And they should pay attention to their experiences. But serious griefers are like social hackers, their one purpose in life is to defeat any challenge you present them with, they do not want you to stop trying to defeat them. That would just be boring, they need to know that you are competing with them, that gives them a reason to carry on.

[Tizzy Canucci]

Well, that was dull griefing attack. Having been a Guardian on a publicly accessible sandbox, I've often seen and heard denser, uglier and far more vile griefing attacks. Creativity comes with a destructive element, but I'd rather that than corporate, sanitised, blandness. I'm rather more concerned with hate speech and personal attacks, something which can be far less visible (or not in the case of twitter)

[astonishing]

Seriously? If the fricken management teams were more than white boys, this problem would be dealt with quickly and rationally.

But none of these series A investment target founders bros have the balls to just step up and be a frickin leader. The bro vulture capitalists keep the bro culture alive and wealthy. The bro culture is killing the soul of silicon valley.

Here is a clue...Get some women and minorities on the board. And on the management team. They won't need to discover this problem in an expensive focus group. They already know what it's like to be "griefed." It's not a cute freedom of speech experience to them. It's personal and it needs to be stopped. And if you allow "griefing" your customers are going to leave your product in the dust because who the hell needs that crap?