Here's the latest talk from Linden Lab veteran Jim "Babbage" Purbrick, who applied what he learned from Second Life and other pioneering virtual worlds in his work for Eve Online and Meta, with the focus here on user safety, i.e. keeping annoyances from trolls and other bad actors in the virtual world down to a dull roar.
These are lessons, as he tells me, "from older, 2D and text-based virtual worlds [that] are often ignored by VR developers. This talk shows how we applied those lessons to Oculus Venues.
"Technologies change, people stay the same."
This is true. One key lesson Jim and his team applied was real time responses to active harassment. (Starting at around 29 minutes in.) If a troll is scurrying about causing problems during a live event, they need to be dealt with in real time, not after abuse reports have been filed by users and processed the next day:
This lead to the creation of a God Mode where Venues support staff could invisibly track and identify abusers, and deal with the bad actor immediately.
"Invisible in-world support was an important innovation we used from 2D worlds which was developed in response to lessons learned from text-based worlds which had visible administrators," he explains.
Oculus Venues, by the way, is different from Horizon Worlds, where Jim's lessons were apparently sidelined, leading to notorious examples of user harassment.
Purbrick, however, prefers not to dredge up that incident here.
"Hopefully there will be people who find the lessons we learned and learned from useful," as he puts it.
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