Back when he was leading metaverse development at Meta last year, Linden Lab veteran Jim Purbrick kept telling Meta staffers to read My Tiny Life, Julian Dibbell's pioneering tale of a virtual world community and a trollish abuser within it. But the Meta team didn't prioritize his advice, and the inevitable happened: When Meta launched Horizon Worlds, it was immediately inundated with reports of sexual assault directed at female avatars.
This new video, from Jim's recent talk at The Mixed Reality Lab in the University of Nottingham, crystallizes the advice that Meta should have prioritized -- and hopefully, will be watched by anyone working on new virtual world/metaverse platforms, ideally before they launch.
"It is very tempting for tech companies to take things that are a lot of work, and worry about them later," as Jim puts it. "One of the phrases you'll hear often is, 'Hey, this is a nice problem to have. If our virtual world is popular enough that people want to turn up and cause mayhem, maybe our virtual world is successful and we can deal with it at that point'. The trouble is what you're trying to do with these rules and systems is to establish norms... If you wait until everyone is acting badly, it is incredibly difficult to turn that community around."
The overall takeaway, as he tells me now:
"[T]echnology changes, but people stay the same. That means that both lessons about how people behaved in previous virtual worlds apply even if the new worlds look very different. It also means that we can't expect people to behave differently just because we've built something we hope will be a techno utopia. It also means that we can potentially learn lessons from virtual worlds that can apply to the real world because we can change the technology and the worlds much more easily than the real world (which is the second half of the talk)."
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