Much Ado About the Metaverse

TW: Before reading either this article or the one linked in the first sentence, please know that both discuss s*xual assault in virtual spaces and the death of a parent.

In the past month, I’ve seen this article shared, commented on, and agreed with by several people I know, work with, and respect. So knowing that these thoughts are circulating in our minds and our discourse, and knowing that there are many other articles circulating—let's just say ado—about the metaverse, I thought it was worth a serious response.

It's right that the topics in the article should rouse our emotions. After all, what is more worth pondering than how to have a meaningful life? And what is more anxiety-inducing than the possibility of a world in which strangers might ignore social norms and touch you without your consent and without repercussions? (Ahem.) These are legitimately important issues about which to advance our understanding, and it's worth addressing them from a place of experience and thoughtfulness.

I'd like to think that as technology has evolved, so would our understanding of its potential harms. But, frankly, every bit of what’s raised in this particular article has been said many times before… about chat rooms, about usenet forums, about social media, about MMOs, about early virtual worlds… the list goes on.?

Take, for example, the Reese Witherspoon quote:?

Take out the phrase “crypto wallets”—or just replace it with “online accounts”—and we’re back to the early 2000s, talking about Second Life. (Let's save discussions about crypto for another day.)

However, these are serious issues and the article is a good springboard for discussion, so give it a read if you haven’t, and let’s jump in.

Real vs. Virtual vs. Physical

First, let’s level-set some terms. The article—and many other discussions of VR—make a distinction between the virtual world and real life.?

I reject that distinction, on the grounds that it’s both inaccurate and dismissive of virtual spaces and experiences, sometimes harmfully so.

Virtual life is part of real life. When you play a game in VR, you're having fun within your real life. When you work in VR, that work gets done in your real life. When you have a conversation with someone in VR, that’s a real-life conversation in every sense… it involves you and at least one other person, both of you really say words, you really hear them, and you feel real emotions and make real plans based on them.?

The real world encompasses the virtual world and the physical world, so I’m going to dismiss the term real… and use virtual and physical instead. And even that distinction isn’t perfect, as VR is absolutely a physical experience as well, using your physical body and physical senses. But the term virtual is fine to describe the digital world around you.

So let’s talk about the two big issues raised in this article: 1) the potential for abuse in VR, and 2) whether experiences in VR can be meaningful.

How can we protect ourselves and each other from abuse?

Abuse happens in all virtual spaces. And it does feel real, because our brains simply aren’t that good at distinguishing fantasy from reality. That’s why movies move our emotions… even animated ones! And books. And video games. And fantasies we create in our own minds.?

And that is why I’m going to lump VR in with social media, MMOs, and other online experiences, to some degree. Human interaction, including abuse, happens in all of them. And in all of them, it feels—it is—real. (By the way, that is one harm in using real vs virtual: by expecting virtual experiences to be not real, we make it easy to dismiss the harm of abuse.)

Unfortunately, abuse also happens in the physical world. And in comparison, online abuse is much easier to detect and regulate. Let's compare:

• The internet can be written in ink… in activity streams, in internet archives, in screenshots, etc... not so with most areas of the physical world.
• Online abuse is often viewable by a much larger audience.
• Moderators are usually only a couple of clicks away or less, and aren’t hampered by the difficulties of physically getting to the abuser and dealing with physical belligerence.

What’s heartening about VR is that because we’ve had this conversation so many times, the need for protections has been obvious for a long time. And so, in most spaces, there are built-in, default-enabled controls to prevent abuse… like customizable proximity settings so that if someone comes closer to you than you want, they disappear to you—and you disappear to them, making it impossible for them to take screenshots that seem to show you engaging in any kind of behavior with them. In some apps, the same will happen if you raise your hand to someone in a “stop” motion, which is even easier and more natural than accessing a moderator a few clicks away. If only I could make people disappear by doing that in the physical world!

So how did beta testers get inappropriately groped in Meta’s Horizon Worlds, as reported in the article? Well, Meta didn’t have these controls implemented at the time; they released their Personal Boundary feature for Horizon Worlds and Venues on February 4, 2022… three days after our referenced article was published. (Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be an update added to the article to acknowledge that.) And they’ve been in other apps for a very long time; I can’t remember a time they weren’t in Rec Room, a game/virtual world that I enjoy with my kids.

Image credit: Meta

Long story short, the problem isn’t the technology; the problem is the will (or lack thereof) of humans and organizations to address abuse. And in my experience, often the companies and individuals who create virtual spaces crack down on it more often and more successfully than the creators of physical spaces… because of that digital record, because they have a strong sense of community, or because they recognize the profitability of doing so.?

Obviously, there aren’t a lot of perfect examples here—every major social media platform has been the object of intense criticism on this score, for example—but excellent examples do exist. I’ve also seen in-person spaces set a high bar for conduct; for example, I count Learning Guild events in that group. We need the same expectations of behavior in online spaces, and we always need tools that are effective and appropriate in that space, whether online or in person.

I always think we should push the envelope toward safer experiences, and I don’t agree with the article’s implication that maybe VR can’t be adequately moderated or regulated… or the implication that online abuse is anything new. Abuse has happened with every new technology that is meant to improve the experience or the availability of human connection,? and safety controls have happened better and more quickly in the VR world compared to many other online spaces.

Can virtual experiences be meaningful?

As to the question of whether physical experience is more meaningful than virtual experience… to me personally, the answer is yes, it usually is.?

To me, the physical dimension of being in someone's presence has huge weight. To me, haptic feedback is not an equal substitute for the touch of someone’s hand.?To me, seeing the avatars of my colleagues in VR is not as meaningful as gathering at a conference in person.?

But, even with that being the case, we need to be careful that we don’t imply—or infer—that virtual connection is unmeaningful. All-or-nothing implications and inferences aren’t very helpful in what should be a nuanced conversation.?

Anyone who wants to debate that is welcome to have the conversation with my mom, who lives 2000 miles away from me and sees my kids in person about twice a year (in normal times.

Go ahead, tell her that her weekly FaceTimes with her grandkids—which, by any definition, are virtual experiences—aren’t meaningful, and see what happens. (Same goes for my FaceTimes with them, when they're at their dad's.)

For that matter, ask the couple who got married in the “first metaverse wedding”. (I highly doubt it’s actually the first, by the way, because while today’s definition of the metaverse isn’t extremely well defined, it includes more than just VR… and because networked VR alone has been around since the early 90s.) The couple clearly thought it was meaningful to not potentially expose their loved ones to Covid. They probably were able to include a larger audience than they may have been able to otherwise, including those who might not be able to travel even in pre-Covid times. They clearly thought it was meaningful to have a way to include the bride’s father, who had passed.

As for the question of “Still, what happens when they take off their headset and they’re just alone in their room on their bed, and suddenly realise that maybe it only looked meaningful?”... I don’t know, you develop real-life coping skills? The same way you do when an in-person friend or lover ghosts you? Or you just look for the next distraction, which are just as plentiful in person as they are online? The question is not about whether the experience is virtual or physical; the question is about the choices you make in how to deal with it.

And I’m not even going to start with the false division between “real friends” and “virtual friends”. I started making long-distance friends in junior high when I got a pen pal who lived in Poland, and she was far more meaningful to me than most of the people in my real-life small town. Regardless of the technology we used, we communicated virtually, over a long distance. Now due to the internet, it’s much easier to find people to connect with for reasons that are deeper than geographic convenience, and to have meaningful relationships with them.

How do virtual spaces improve access to connections, experiences, and information?

While we’re comparing the meaningfulness of in-person and virtual life, let’s not make the assumption that everyone has equal access to the same physical spaces, or enjoys them equally. There are a million reasons related to mobility and other issues of ability, financial situation, gender, race, and so on, that make that not always the case. Covid restrictions leveled the playing field somewhat for those who have those barriers, because almost everyone was forced to use the technology that has long been in development to connect and entertain the world, but the barriers are still there.

This understanding is not new, either, so it’s disappointing that while the article does address many relevant lines of thought going back to Plato, it completely omits the question of access.?

One of my early exposures to the idea of virtual worlds was when my dad encouraged me to read Piers Anthony’s Killobyte when I was a teenager. In 1993, Killobyte addressed pretty much all of the concerns we have about VR today, and the main characters are in the virtual world because of their disabilities; one is a paraplegic, and one is a type 1 diabetic who also struggles with depression. And it’s likely there are earlier examples than that; I make no claims of exhaustive sci-fi scholarship.

[Side thoughts: My very earliest exposure to the idea of virtual worlds was probably Star Trek: The Next Generation… and I still hope the holodeck comes to exist in my lifetime. The author of the article conveniently overlooks Star Trek and much other science fiction in their assertion that thought experiments about fantasy vs. reality only “occasionally appear in pop culture” and “the verdict was always the same: reality is more meaningful.” Also… the protagonists in The Matrix disconnect not because the virtual world is philosophically inferior, but to save humanity from being enslaved to robots. If, like me, you found this section of the article both interesting and highly problematic, check out this video on more recent extensions of Robert Nozick’s work.]

Anyway, go ahead and ask an introvert whether a virtual experience or an in-person experience is preferable to them. Or someone who gets overstimulated by bright lights, noise, crowds, and touch. Or someone who wears a colostomy bag. Or someone who wouldn’t even be able to afford to go to an in-person event because of travel expenses or lack of affordable childcare. Or someone who experiences marginalization due to their gender, size, or race… but might be able to partially opt out of that marginalization by using an avatar in a virtual space.?

I think they would have some much more nuanced answers than this article asserts. And let’s understand that to someone for whom physical spaces are inaccessible or inhospitable, the question of whether virtual experiences are meaningful can feel pretty ableist. They’re far more meaningful than not being able to participate at all.

Finally, it’s out of scope for this article, but there are countless ways that virtual spaces and experiences can help people prepare for physical spaces and experiences. Workplace training and development—my own field—is one, but not the only one. We’re going to see much more of that melding in the next few years, where virtual experiences support physical experiences and vice versa.

To pit them against each other is, honestly, pointless.

What now?

To wrap this up, I have two challenges for all of us when we discuss virtual experiences vs. physical ones.

First, let’s absolutely keep raising issues of abuse of all kinds. And let’s do it in a way that expects the creators of online spaces and technologies to make their creations safer. Virtual spaces should have at least the same expectations of conduct as physical spaces… or better, because technology enables us to more easily restrict unsafe behavior.?

Second, while we discuss the meaningfulness of virtual experience, let’s include the issue of access and the incredible benefits the metaverse offers. And let’s put that same pressure on the creators of virtual spaces and technologies to prioritize accessibility, because while the virtual world levels the playing field for many, there are still ways that virtual spaces themselves are inaccessible, too.