You knew it was coming. The technologies are developing to introduce us to virtual reality games, and right away, there are men showing up to ruin it all.
I wasn’t as experienced a player as BigBro442. Everywhere I ran, he appeared beside me, ready to grope as soon as the zombie wave was over. I’d had enough. With a final parting obscenity, I yanked the headset off my face and stood back in the sunny, familiar room of my brother-in-law’s home.
What had just happened? I hadn’t lasted 3 minutes in multiplayer without getting virtually groped.
There are no penalties for that sort of behavior in the game. There is no one looking on to see that someone is having a miserable experience in what should be fun entertainment. BigBro442 — even his chosen name is a tip-off that he’s a creep — is more experienced in that particular game, which means he’s been playing it regularly, and hasn’t experienced anything to drive him off, unlike the woman who would write that piece.
We just shrug and accept that there will be assholes in games. It’s people like BigBro442 who convinced me to abandon multiplayer games — that, and the developers didn’t give a damn. Every game is targeted right at the young male jerk audience.
Contrast that, though, with what happened when two women went on a date, and the creepy real-life version of BigBro442 started harassing them.
Here’s what happened when the man started asking me and my date about our private lives: First of all, not one, not two, but three employees — two men and a woman — rolled up on this dude, like a very refined food-service gang. Then, everybody behind the bar looked up, watching the scene, and you could almost hear them all thinking Just make one move, fool, I swear to fucking God. I realize now that the staff had been watching us for some time, trying to measure our level of discomfort at an intervention versus their obligation to their customers to maintain a chill, relaxed atmosphere. I’m going to guess that some of these staff members were LGBTQ folks, but all of them were the strongest allies I’ve ever met in my life.
The manager then spoke clearly: “Sir, you need to leave. You’ve made our patrons uncomfortable, and we do not tolerate this kind of behavior in THE BRANDY LIBRARY.” That’s a hilarious statement, but it’s also a very beautiful one — especially when you’re a scared twenty-something on your first big date with a person of the same gender, and you just want to have a nice night.
Wow. That’s how you do it.
It sounds like The Brandy Library is a good place to visit in New York…hey, wait a minute. I looked at the photos of the interior, and the address, and I think I have been there, years ago. But it had a different name. I think?
Well, gosh, I guess I’m going to have to visit New York again and check it out.
I’m not so keen on checking out yet another multi-player video game with little boys running rampant.
So, what name were you going by?
Never mind.
The bar had a different name.
/Emily
That’s a genuinely lovely story. People, how to ally right. I wish I lived in NY so I could go there. I suspect with customer service and staff like that they are doing just fine without my support, though!
For me, this is what stands out:
Reads just like a William Gibson novel from the 1980s.
The farce that was Second Life notwithstanding, VR is hardly just for games.
(Or, the medium is not the message except in a very general, very limited sense)
Assholes like BigBro442 is a big reason why online games like Hearthstone have no online chat (unless you’re friends), even though many players would love to have the feature. As it is, some players will ask to friend you after a game just so they can hurl insults at you before unfriending you before you can even reply.
That’s what team-killing is for.
@tacitus, yeah, if a game has multiplayer and it isn’t being fucked up by someone without a real life, but determined to ruin everyone else’s experience, I’ve learned to turn off any chat feature.
Far too often, it’s some loud mouthed teen or preteen, running off at the mouth in a way that’d have earned our kids a bar of soap in the mouth.
That latter is something I had previously never, ever considered doing to a minor child – especially, as I recall precisely how that felt to have it done to me.
But, my view changed when dealing with some little turdlings while playing with a group of veterans of our war in Afghanistan and some snotling decided to regale us all with his pathetic excuse for behavior, or to be more accurate, misbehavior. Some of the crap that he said would’ve made my old mother superior blanch, which would have been an accomplishment worthy of expulsion from school in my school days.
Trust me, I was a challenge for those nuns! A lot bright, easily bored when I know the information being taught, I could become quite disruptive – you’re boring me. That turned into a problem when we moved out into the suburbs and the parochial schools had both disciplinary and quality control problems. So, I switched to public school and found myself ahead in mathematics, geography, English and science. But, on the plus side, back then, we had a culture class, teaching the cultures of the people on this planet, which also covered various faiths at a “mile high visage” on them.
We also had an observatory and electron microscopes.
Yes, really. old transmission electron microscopes, but we were allowed to use them – under very close supervision.
And yes, I did burn through my grid a few times until I got the hang of beam current.
Oddly, the language that I hear from these creatures online today is something that’d have an adult introducing us to our parents, along with the language that we used in their presence.
It’s a shame that parents today lack the time or desire to actually monitor their children’s behavior online.*
As for the dweeb in this story, even as a patron, *I* would suggest that he and his date depart, as his behavior is ruining *our* experience there. Even money, he’d try to tell his elder where to get off.
To swiftly learn that cane somehow slipped, went between his legs, at knee level, where I lost my balance, pitched slightly forward and he’d fall to the floor.
A series of highly improbable events would result in that cane laying across his inguinal region, while my assessments repeatedly turn into accidental sternal rubs and nerve pressure points being blundered into.
I’ve done that very thing precisely once, when it was a very hard earned effort.
But, I tend to become excessively irked when someone sexually assaults a woman in my presence. In that precise case, it was something quite similar to what Trump discussed in his “locker room talk”.**
*This, from a man who could have embarrassed General George S. Patton, but also knows how to use a gentlemanly chewing out mode that was far more devastating.
**Even today, I earn a double take, when my cane flashes up quickly and safely, to engage the tiny handicapped door open button, press it and return the cane into place, while not missing a step – thereby avoiding the need for my wife to have to stop walking in order to get and potentially fall reaching for that button, then regain her grip on her walker and enter the establishment.
Old dad also took on his eldest daughter back when she was captain of her college fencing team and won. Even though my knee was the size of Kansas when we finally called it a match. Cane, foil tip, six of one, half dozen of the other. ;)
Re: wzrd1 @ #7….
Back when I was a college student taking saber, our fencing master was a former European military fencing champion. When I knew him, he was about 60 and was significantly faster than any of us 20 year olds.
On the main topic… It takes a game run by a company with active GMs. You file reports, the GMs do something about the creeps. The problem is that the game companies tend to slack off because maintaining good enough efforts against that stuff is expensive.
Since this is a moderately popular indy VR game, I’m guessing they don’t have the manpower to monitor behaviour at all, much less check abuse reports. Probably the best they can do without eliminating multiplayer is give the users the ability to block other users so they don’t exist for you and you don’t exist for them, and encourage players to use that ability even when the abuse is directed at someone else. Not sure where to go from there; you can’t penalize people for being blocked, because then abusers can team up and all block the victim. But word of mouth is not good enough either.
It’s about a 1/2 mile from the WTC PATH station, so it’s pretty accessible for me. I’ll have to check the place out. Of course, with that sort of drink menu, it’ll take me about an hour to figure out what to get.
I wonder if there is any significance to the abusers choice of name…. Is it a reference to the 442nd Infantry Regiment?
My compliments to the restaurant staff, and my thanks. Just two days back the daughter was out on her first date with a woman, in a restaurant, and fortunately had no creep bothering them. It is good to think they would have had support.
@11
my guess would be it is a reference to an Oldsmobile 442 a late 60 early 70 muscle car
with any real class just a production street racer from GM nothing even remotely like “go for broke”.
like bro.
uncle frogy
dam it that was supposed to be without any real class not with
I do not need spell check as much as I need a proof reader that is not me!
uncle frogy
Well, at least this particular problem will solve itself, though not as we might hope it would.
2nd wave VR is already on the way out due to prohibitive costs, technical inadequacy and a game catalog that’s just a bunch of glorified tech demos. In other words, the exact same reasons VR 1.0 failed.
The behaviour above is all too common in certain types of online game, while I’d like to see it stopped the question is how? Having enough staff to monitor everything going on in those games is impractical (unless you want an access fee of several hundred dollars/month because that’s what it’d take to employ enough staff to monitor everything in real time) and that sort of crap is incredibly hard to identify via automated means unless they actually say something really unpleasant using their keyboard rather than their voice.
The game wasn’t named but I’m guessing it was one of the brown shooters, call of duty, medal of honour etc. consider for a moment what those games are about and the sort of audience they attract. They are basically selecting the worst possible subset of the gaming community, wannabe murderers for the state.
If you want a better experience online play the pay per month games, not the free to access games. I’ve all but given up on the free to access MMORPGs due to the presence of griefers and trolls (and believe me, my dangling genitals confer on me NO immunity to morons in online games), when they have to pay to create an account and may have to find another card and pay again when banned for being complete arseholes online they’re less likely to be so IMHO.
@ adamcolley, 16
You referenced several of the most popular and mainstream of titles in one of the most accessible, low-skilled genre of games. This is not a niche audience at all, and to suggest that women don’t belong there, to pull a victim-blaming “what do you expect?!,” is risible. You might as well say that life itself is not particularly welcoming to women, and you’d be right. But both are unhelpful non-sequiturs and, in this case, demonstrably incorrect.
The “audience,” as you call it, already contains women. Women exist in all audiences, they are not interlopers or visitors, but founders and full-benefits members. Please don’t retreat into that same boring, geekboy gate-keeping trope about men owning something and women merely visiting.
Believe me, genital configuration is not the cause of the disproportionate aggression, violence, and harassment women and other marginalized people experience on-line. You may not be immune–no one is–but you’re not in any position to tell women they ought to self-select out of free or inexpensive gaming experiences because men are either behaving badly or acting as bystanders to bad behavior.
@adamcolley #16,
Actually, some of those players, which we’re glad to know that we’re the worst possible subset of the gaming community, are true “murderers for the state”. Glad to see that you loathe military veterans so, perhaps we can bring back conscription. Then, you can have a wider selection of people to loathe.
Oddly, when MOH 2010 edition had a lot of service members who were on R&R playing it. Odd, as the game was banned in the PX, due to players being able to play Taliban characters and micromanagement by AAFES commanding general.
Those players behaved themselves and actually guided teams of other players (many of whom weren’t military).
I’ve seen a number of solutions tried out to very mixed success. League of Legends had a pretty robust ban system, but I’m but she goes much real follow through there was on it. In any event, I stopped playing.
Destiny doesn’t let you meet and talk to people in game, you have to know them and be Xbox friends with them. This barrier may seem trivial, but I have had a really good time and I’ve asked the female members of my group and they say it’s been positive.
So I think the path towards fixing this lies in putting little barriers up. It’s hardly intrusive and seems to be more effective than the traditional “Report Player” option
Elite has the ability to form your own groups, which basically give you access to the underlying universe with all of its NPCs, etc., but no other player characters except group members.
Needless to say, a certain class of gamers complains bitterly that this ruins their fun. Their fun being predicated on ruining other players’ fun. They aren’t very thoughtful people.
adamcolley@#16:
while I’d like to see it stopped the question is how?
It’s so ridiculously easy, I’m going to assume you’re being rhetorical or arguing in bad faith.
Most games that have any kind of persistent character have persistent items, achievements, skins, levels, skills that you earn as you play over time. Losing those represents a significant penalty. So: if you’re abusive, you lose your account and all your linked characters.
The problem is that very few gaming companies are willing to take on griefers because they usually are also incredibly vocal and they want to avoid conflict because of the bad publicity. So they trade one form of bad publicity for another. The truth is that they have the sort of customers you don’t want – they just haven’t figured that out.
adamcolley @16 said: “If you want a better experience online play the pay per month games, not the free to access games.”
I’ve found that for me, Villagers and Heroes (despite being free to play) is actually pretty good. I’m playing on a European server (I’m Western Australian, it’s about the same virtual “distance” either way to the US or Europe) so that may be the moderating factor there – I’ve noticed people from the EU and UK tend to be a bit more polite on first meeting to people they don’t know (on average) than people from the USA. I think it also helps the game itself is fairly low-key and cartoony, as well as not being the most heavily populated community out there. It’s a quiet little game where I can quietly putter about levelling up my characters, and know I’m not likely to run into anyone – and the main reason for this is because I’m about 8 hours out of synch with everyone else. Not that great for multiplayer, but hey, that’s not really why I’m doing this.
To be honest, I haven’t found there’s any significant difference between Free to Play and Pay to Play games – some of the worst trolling and griefing I’ve seen was in World of Warcraft, which is very definitely PTP; while as I mentioned above, the largely FTP world of Villagers and Heroes doesn’t appear to have any noticeable problems. To be honest, I’d argue the better marker for whether you’re going to get griefers and such like is whether a game allows PvP (player versus player) battles – that’s one thing Villagers and Heroes doesn’t have, and thus the kind of player who gets their jollies out of beating up and annoying other players (whether they want it or not) isn’t attracted to the game in the first place. If it’s mainly PvE (player vs environment) there’s no real attraction for them, because they’re not allowed to attack other people, by design.
(Which means the starting point for VR developers in dealing with the harasser mindset is going to be creating an environment where these sorts of harassing actions either aren’t feasible, or just aren’t as rewarding for the players – unisex, androgynous player “skins” and a requirement for gender-neutral player names strikes me as a good starting point.)
adamcolley
This is only a deterrent if they actually believe they will be banned for such behaviour – and there’s plenty of evidence that a lot of game companies aren’t interested in moderating this stuff and are happy to let them carry on unchallenged
applehead #15:
I’m assuming you’re basically counting everything before the Rift as ‘VR 1.0’, so:
Prohibitive costs – yes and no. The Rift and Vive are expensive, yes, but there’s also various other VR headsets coming out, like the Playstation VR, which is roughly half the price, and for smartphones, various headsets at various prices all the way down to Google Cardboard, which is a headset made of cardboard plus a couple of lenses which is something like $15 or so for an official one – but which you can make yourself for even cheaper.
Technical inadequacy – yes and no. For the high-end ones (Rift and Vive), you need a pretty meaty PC to run it, which can be expensive, but, if you have such a PC, there are compromises and flaws that are there to get VR running at all, but you don’t really notice them, most of the time. The PSVR looks to be roughly on a par with the big boys, with it being better in some areas, but worse in others, and the smartphone ones depend largely on the quality of your smartphone’s screen.
Game catalog that’s just a bunch of glorified tech demos – no. There are some games that do fit that description, but one of the strengths of ‘2nd wave VR’, as you’re calling it, is that it doesn’t require a game to be specifically VR – if developers are of a mind to do so, they can take a game they already have, or are already in the middle of developing, and add VR support, whilst still allowing people to play the same game without VR. This is why there’s games like Project Cars, Elite:Dangerous and Subnautica, which are games that you can play in VR, but don’t have to. There’s also the fact that VR is not restricted to just games, even purely talking about entertainment – the idea is still very much in it’s infancy, but there’s now such a thing as VR movies.
adamcolley #16:
In any online game, there is a lot of information that can be logged, if the developer is of a mind, which can then be investigated if someone makes a complaint. This is how, for example, MMOG developers catch people using hacks and cheats. The only question is how motivated the developers are to do that. As for people saying things rather than typing them, that’s easily solved by integrating speech-to-text software.
Well, actually, if you click through to the original article, you’d find out you’re wrong here. The game is actually QuiVr, where you play as a bowman defending a castle. What makes this particular virtual groping even more nuts is that your avatar, in that game, is a disembodied helmet and two hands with a bow.
My experience is that you get assholes, of various different types, in just about any online game, regardless if it’s free-to-play, pay-to-play, buy once-to-play, and also no matter what type of game. You only tend to get less assholes when assholery isn’t really tolerated by the rest of the playerbase – and even assholes get bored of trying to play an online game when they constantly get booted out of the group, booted off the server or simply get ignored by just about everyone.
@whheydt, 11:
I was curious to find out what type of person joins a paid video game to grope strangers, and a quick search found a corresponding email address and some other info. 442 is just the person’s house number in their address.
Huh.. My graphics card is not “that” old, but it lags like hell when trying to play the new game from the makers of Myst – Obduction, during their fancy teleporter transitions. If I upgraded, and I suspect I will at some point, since even a few older games, like Far Cry 3, have some serious issues that a faster GPU would fix (I don’t know who optimized the PC version of that game, or if the problem is too much background BS going wrong with their “online” tracking of your progress, status, etc., but.. ugh…). Its pretty much a given that anything I upgrade to would do VR, I just wouldn’t have the glasses yet. If the LCD tech they tried, briefly, but which turned out not to work well, so nVidia removed support for in all the later drivers, I could already do it, sort of (it used a display with polarization, and standard movie glasses, but you couldn’t adjust the “offset” properly for viewing, like you could with LCD shutters).
So, no.. the reason why its expensive isn’t that you can’t do VR with lesser equipment, its that the games themselves are cramming in updates to their own graphics engines, which push past the “current” limits of what the older games bothered to do, at all, in terms of all the fancy things like lighting, scene complexity, details, etc. And, this is “always” a problem with every new game – it will almost run well, at lower settings (unless someone f-es up like they did with Far Cry 3), but only if the game lets you downgrade the experience to what the older card supports. The reason almost all the new VR “needs” all the higher end hardware is that they are forcing a “minimum to get the right experience”, which is several GPU generations more recent than a) what many people are still using to play games, which still can run, at a penalty, with older GPUs and less memory, and b) what would have been, previously, “The cheap alternative to getting the latest, most expensive hardware.”, i.e., a small bump up in speed or GPU, just to run the new game, instead of paying out the full cost of the newest available.
In short.. its enough of a jump up, in terms of requirements, that there is no “cheap route” to getting their, if you plan to take it seriously. That said.. the biggest “jump” is the extra hardware – i.e., what ever high end, “this actually does what its supposed to, instead of faking it with a cheat.”, goggles, and the like. And, yeah, its not something I am willing to, quite yet, shell out for either, just to get the VR effects. So…
Kagehi #26:
There is a certain amount of truth to this, but you also have to consider the way VR actually works – what is basically happening is that two slightly different 2D images are being rendered and displayed, one for each eye, which fools your brain into thinking you’re seeing a 3D space. Also, because any shuddering, stuttering or juddering is not only much more noticeable in VR than on a 2D monitor, but can also actually induce nausea, it has been considered that 60 frames per second is an absolute minimum for VR games. This means that you really need hardware capable of rendering the game world, twice over, at a minimum of 60FPS (and, ideally, more like 90FPS). However, various ways of dealing with low frame rates are being developed and improved, so that could very well change.
Hmm. Yeah. Most displays will do 120fps, even if the games themselves won’t. But, yeah, this is a major issue. Its also the bottleneck that I double Linden Labs will really fix even in the new Sansar. I have commented more than a few times, as someone that RPs in Second Life, that a) relying on all the data being sent from the servers for objects and textures, and b) having to reload all of that data every time (or pretty damn close), is 90% of all the lag. If they had some way to mark items that rarely/never change, and far more permanently “store” them local on your machine, they would vastly improve their frame rates. Instead.. most of the time spent is purely in getting the stuff “too” you do display it. Ironically, they actually sped things up by doing most of the graphics calculations on the server (until you get too much happening, and it lags that), then pushing less data over all. I have no idea what the experience would be like if they a) stopped cramming more than one sim on a single server, or b) used the best servers available, but.. it still isn’t likely to match what just being able to load the data direct on the local machine can do (assuming the caching/load process isn’t crap locally, and causing problems itself).
But, this goes back to pushing the minimum experience. If you slapped all the graphics down to the point, like you can do in, say Everquest 2 (you can make the damn thing run practically 8-bit, if you need to push up the frame rate, by vastly downgrading the graphics), then you could easily get the needed frame rates. But.. if you want the game to be VR, and have all the “near photo realistic textures and effects”…. yeah.. that you are going to pay dearly for, in terms of hardware.
We’ve already gotten to the point that VR lets trolls grope female avatars. Not to sound like a Luddite, but one of the biggest counterpoints to fully immersive VR like in that video a few months back would be that players might be able to actually sexually assault each other through their games.
emergence, dunno that too many players have full-body haptic interfaces yet.
@John, pity. Full body feedback and a virtual taser… ;)
@john
I know, I’m just saying that if someone ever does invent them that some precautions would be in order.
@emergence, see my joke with John, above, in reference to a full body taser, in a full submergence environment.
This man, knowing what our society has failed in, would happily give the women the controls to that device.
But then, I’ve never put myself or anyone else into a position where such a thing would be used.
Well, save in real life, with my own wife. No need for a weapon there. No means no.
A bit of whimpering and kicking a rock gives us both a good chuckle.
But then, we’ve been married for 35+ years.
We’re also known to play “The Lockhorns” at parties, out of pure humor and education. Some young splat eventually yelps out, “If I said that to *my* wife, I’d get a knife in my ribs!”, to which one of us would alternate, deadpan, “It isn’t *our* fault that you have a fucked up marriage, try *talking* and actually *listening* for a change!”
Brings the house down with every long lasting couple applauding, every time.
Tis a pity we don’t choose that for a living, save that our current positions make far more money. (I honestly have a confused emotional state that no emoticon exists for, loving to give that lesson to many, not loving moving about or making a *lot* less money, as we’re not getting younger and our retirement savings were repeatedly eroded by various and sundry economic issues over the decades)
So, within that context and that of a parent of grown children and grandchildren, that is our opinion.
And yes, I did indeed consult my wife. She left it to me to express our views, but then, she suffers from severe dyslexia, mine is modest.
Now, the real question:
Whateverinhell happened to people having a common guideline of what is and is not acceptable? Even at Woodstock, there was such a thing.
Oh, Joe McCarthy, the man with no shame…
Recently adopted by a major political party.
wzrd1:
Been discussed here extensively.
Thing is: there is no such commonality, everyone is different — there are kinksters among us, even.
(The answer is mutual consent before the act — explicit consent being best)
emergence @32, I doubt I need to write this, but for the record, I entirely agree with you.
It should be a mandatory consideration.