Papers Worth Reading: "Shaping Pro-Social Interaction in VR"
Authors: Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Anya Kolesnichenko, Katherine Isbister
Available At: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290605.3300794
We seek to elucidate the constellation of design choices that shape pro-social interactions in commercial social VR… to study the relationship between design choices and social practices… [and] clarify the stakes of these choices.
My first reaction reading this paper was a sigh of relief. This is, in and of itself, not another study on some microcosm of interaction touting a VR feature’s capacity to make users 37% more likely to want to continue the experience, but rather a significantly pulled-back look on the features designers have chosen to implement, and the correlation with their creator’s varied philosophies on human interaction, agency, and responsibility. Of course, I poke some fun at myself - my thesis proposal having just been accepted under the working title Towards Increased Telepresence in Co-Located Extended-Reality Experiences - but also feel validation in the core of my thesis’ pursuit to uncover the effect audio has in a human-connection-centered, rather than the more common attention-centered, line of questioning.
Having recently attended the GameSoundCon 2020 conference, of which many social events were held virtually, this was a question that was building off of a great deal of important conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues about their relative lack of safety in environments where “networking” and “socialization” are also so often conflated with copious alcohol and plenty of extreme social/career power dynamic differences. I found myself thinking:
How does the virtual space affect how we interact? How are our personal boundaries boundaries codified, respected, or enabled to be violated?
I personally remember experiencing a profound weirdness in unintentionally walking “through” many people at times, and found both navigating and interpreting the less-tangible relationship of space and body language extremely difficult. McVeigh-Shultz, Kolesnichenko, and Isbister, through the interviews they conducted, answer many of those questions in a quite meaningful way.
“this [auditorium] didn’t … have the seating… it used to be a madhouse…. Once we put the seating in,… they [understood] that in real life you would sit down and be quiet”.
- Tamara Hughes, Community Support Coordinator, “Rec Room”
The impact the space itself - and the societal expectations of such - seems to be a through-line across all developers. Sports-themed space Rec Room had to eliminate a Locker Room-style area for the ensuing “locker room talk”, while AltspaceVR’s inclusion of burgers, marshmallows, and firecrackers around a campfire (itself chosen for the underlying space-experience of storytelling and intimate memory-making) made users all the more comfortable to engage in these virtualized spaces almost ritualistically. This is a fascinating (if understandable) concept, that to me presents an incredible challenge for level designers in the near future. Once we’ve moved past the “you can do stuff kinda like real life here too!” phase, how will these lessons impact more fantastical or abstract experiences? The potential for exploration, combination, and subversion is nearly limitless: Could you have an Escherian lounge space that despite the initial visual disarray promotes peace and relaxation? The architectural / spatial / location vocabulary is rich with subtext that’s only just beginning to be uncovered.
One particularly interesting observation made is that of the replacement and/or creation of new Gestures to replace old ones. AltspaceVR allows users to generate a small cloud of one of a handful of emojis, which I can anecdotally confirm becomes a great way of communicating emotion in larger group environments - say something really nice, everyone throws up a heart emoji - everyone feels great! And one intereviewed VRChat content creator talked about the onset of gestures like "head patting” or “feeding” as a replacement for hugs. While this is a whole different topic, it’s worth taking a moment to recognize the ways in which specific communities engage with each other: VRChat has a noted presence of users who identify as - and create avatars that reflect this identification - as “furries”, and the freedom (or lack thereof) in avatar selection inside respective communities can lead to a growing vocabulary of virtual body language. “Petting” is a gesture that likely carries different meanings to canine-styled avatars than, say, robots.
A VRChat user with a ‘Furry Avatar’ posing in a recreation of 2020’s most spectacular location mix-up
“The fact that the community is empowered to kind of just make space their own, has mean we’ve been able to lean on a few community members that serve as ambassadors as well.”
- Ishita Kapur, Senior Product Manager, AltspaceVR
Deciding here to ultimately lay the burden of responsibility of things like moderation and permission is, in and of itself, an explicit decision with great ramifications. As we’ve seen play out dozens of times in the public eye, social networks and platforms often grapple with this, and make conscious decisions based on an (uneven) mixture of business interests and the intended ethics of the platform. A complete lack of repercussions and ‘do what you want’-style approach can lead to 4chan (or 8chan)-style de-evolution as “the place where those who’ve been kicked out of every other space meet”, and even enforcing pre-existing guidelines can become blurry when trying to balance an appearance of fairness, as we’ve most seen in the backlash Twitter, AWS, Apple, and Google Received for no longer supporting certain politicians and/or services that repeatedly broke the TOS.
I referenced Kapur’s quote both for it’s truth as both a high-positive potential social decision and savvy business move, but also caution against the part that was left unsaid which is most likely something along the lines of “but we’ll kick you out if you do things we disagree with”. Leaning on individuals as ‘brand ambassadors’ can be a tremendous way to bring people into the social space, and cultivate community, but it left unchecked it can be quite a dangerous force. As one non-VR example: when Games Workshop posted a statement on inclusivity, it sparked a noted negative reaction from certain “community leaders”, who’s angrily broadcasted message to their >250k followers left a number of folks feeling significantly more excluded than before the official statement was released. While GW forced said figure to remove part of their brand name from his social media, the damage had already been done to the community members. The community-leader centric approach can be a wonderful way to onboard new folks and create ambassadors for your environments, but there’s a certain risk of mutiny if there isn’t consistent awareness of what content is being moderated on your platform.
One challenge of blocking actions that require the victim orient [themselves] to the offender is that harassers often attempt to game this mechanic by escaping quickly.
Lastly, it’s worth mentioning the bevy of reporting strategies that various platforms offer. Blocking, muting, “personal space bubbles”, and more are some of the present options that users have to ‘protect themselves’ in these virtual environments. In an attempt to address the issue in the above quote, many platforms have implemented some form of ‘recent interactions’ list so users don’t have to have their boundaries exclusively defensible through in-environment navigation and targeting, which is a great step! I want to turn, however, a critical eye towards one disparity between the two categories McVeigh-Schultz et al. deliniate: open ‘social VR’ environments, and “private (safe) environments”. I’m somewhat critical of this distinction (in the eyes of the designers, not McVeigh-Schultz et al.), especially as there’s a trend towards increased security features in the former.
CW/TW: Indirect references to SA/SV
It’s a well known statistic that the vast majority of sexual assaults are perpetrated by those known to the victim. This number ranges from 76% in all cases to 93% of cases with juvenile victims. Without belaboring the point, safety features need to be a priority and consideration even in “private environments”. While the potential for bad actors to come from nowhere in an open meeting space is certainly present, treating the potential for virtual-violation among known users in ‘invite-only trusted spaces’ (such as conferences, as I previously mentioned) as a negligible concern is naive at best, and harmful design practice at worst. I don’t mean to levy accusations against one particular company, but rather warn against the danger of assuming that encountering a ‘troll’ in an anonymized space is the greatest threat to personal comfort.
Sorry for the long read, but I think the core of the observations made by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Anya Kolesnichenko, and Katherine Isbister were fascinating in their breadth and observational poignancy. Check out their paper and don’t just give my thoughts a read! If you’re interested in digging more into some of the concepts, here’s some quotes (and their referenced papers) that I’m planning on looking further into:
“Social VR can magnify conflict or harassment [27, 35], underscoring the importance of designing for social safety in shared immersive environments”
“These include a comprehensive set of guidelines for usability and playability in VR [11]”
“The Connections that interview respondents made between environmental cues and social expectations also resonate with longstanding interests within HCI concerning the relationship between space (as a designed medium) and place (as the social fabric [13, 15].”
(For those interested in Interview analysis techniques) “WE utilized a semi-automated transcription and video annotation tool (Temi)… for analysis we took cues from Saldaña’s approach to qualitative coding [32].