I discuss artist Matt Romein’s work, including his “Meat Puppet Arcade”, where users are encouraged to manipulate his virtual ragdoll self, and his “Virtual Reality Travel Agency”, a piece of performance art in VRChat. The boundaries of the real self and virtual become muddied when discussing violence, and as a different side of the coin the disparity between reality and fiction may be smaller than it seems.

Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips highlights the disparity between the marketing-savvy ‘Virtual Reality is an Empathy Machine’ tagline and the reality that it’s still inaccessible to many users who have any limited mobility. In my own work, all of binaural sound is predicated on a user having two fully functioning ears. These limitations are highly exclusionary, and we can do better.

When the medium of interaction becomes virtual reality, however, online harassment is magnified due to the “embodied” nature of inhabiting a virtual avatar. We discuss some of the proposed design paradigms put forth by Michelle Cortese and Andrea Zeller, as part of their Code Word series.