A woman playing a virtual-reality game called QuiVr was virtually groped by a male player, prompting a discussion about harassment and rules in the VR setting. In a Medium post describing the virtual incident, Jordan Belamire says one of the faceless, nameless players in the interactive game, which puts you in the same scenario as countless other players, started virtually groping her after hearing her voice, which she calls “the only indication of my femaleness.”
When she immediately yelled at him to stop, he started chasing her in the virtual setting.
“This goaded him on,” she says, “and even when I turned away from him, he chased me around, making grabbing and pinching motions near my chest. Emboldened, he even shoved his hand toward my virtual crotch and began rubbing.”
Because the game isn’t actually real life, all of this happened while Jordan stood next to her husband and brother-in-law, neither of whom seemed to grasp the harshness of the situation, which they were all handling by making joking, angry comments towards the virtual groper.
“All they could see was the flat computer screen version of the groping,” she says. “Outside the total immersion of the QuiVr world, this must have looked pretty funny, and definitely not real.”
But, as she points out, they had only just nodded along with her as she gasped “jumping” off a virtual cliff, agreeing with how real the game felt. For her, their dismissal of this situation, which involved another actual person, or at least that person’s intentions, seemed like a dismissal of the actions themselves.
“Of course, you’re not physically being touched,” she writes, “just like you’re not actually one hundred feet off the ground, but it’s still scary as hell.”
Jordan’s story is a reminder that rules about assault and intimidation matter everywhere, not just in places where the offenders might be caught or seen. Regardless of Jordan's history with sexual assault, a situation like this in a VR setting is undoubtably scary. If a sexual assault survivor where to be put in this kind of situation while playing a VR game, this could easily traumatize them and force them to relive their assaults.
Hopefully, the VR world will set up ways to report and stop attempts to bully and harass people out of the joy of playing a realistic zombie game in the comfort of their own home. Otherwise, every VR game will have to come with a trigger warning.
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