Striding through the snow-covered fortress, shooting zombies with her bow and arrow, Jordan Belamire felt like a god – right up until the moment someone named BigBro442 decided to “virtually rub [her] chest” and make her feel like just another “powerless woman”.

“Even when I turned away from him, he chased me around, making grabbing and pinching motions near my chest,” she wrote in a Medium post of her experience playing QuiVR, a virtual reality game. “Emboldened, he even shoved his hand toward my virtual crotch and began rubbing.”

Sexual harassment has been a feature of online and gaming communities from the earliest days of the internet. Until now, the abuse has been largely limited to verbal and visual messages, but as virtual reality technology becomes more immersive, the line between our real bodies and our digital bodies begins to blur.

Are we doomed to build virtual worlds that are as hostile to women as the real one?

And what will we do when virtual abuse feels as real as a physical assault?

‘No bodies touched’

More than two decades ago, Julian Dibbell chronicled the very real emotional fallout from a “rape” that took place in a text-based multi-user dimension, known as LambdaMOO. The “rape” involved one user hijacking the system to write sentences describing sexual acts involving other users’ avatars.

Emboldened, he even shoved his hand toward my virtual crotch and began rubbing Jordan Belamire, QuiVR player

“No bodies touched,” Dibbell wrote in the Village Voice. And yet, to the victims, the violation was real: “posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face – a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words’ emotional content was no mere playacting.”

“If you highly identify with your avatar and are portraying yourself in an authentic manner, you’re going to feel violated,” said Jesse Fox, an Ohio State University professor who researches the social implications of virtual worlds. “It wouldn’t be different if someone sent you a harassing email to your work email or harassed you in a chat room.”

But Fox warns that virtual reality opens the door to a new level of violation.

“What’s different about virtual environments is an extra layer of immersion. If you are being groped in the real world versus a virtual world, the visual stimuli do not differ,” she said. “You are seeing it. It is appearing to happen to your own body. Those layers of lifelike experience are going to be more traumatizing in that moment.”

In addition, Fox said, virtual reality groping or harassment adds a second level of shock by destroying the user’s sense of immersion in the virtual world.

For Belamire, the virtual groping was comparable to being groped in real life – something that had happened to her twice before.

“The psychological trauma was about equal,” she told the Guardian. “The shock I felt from real life groping versus that first virtual groping was about the same. You wonder what kind of person thinks it’s OK to do that and are disgusted that it happened to you.”

The ability of VR users to harm one another raises all sorts of complex ethical and legal questions. Mark Methenitis, an attorney who has long chronicled issues in video game law, said that society is not yet at the point where virtual assaults should be considered criminal.

“Most sexual assault and rape statutes nationwide would require some sort of physical contact. While I admit that VR can give you sensation, to include that within actual assault – it’s sort of a slippery slope,” he said.

“At the point where people do get actual sensory feedback – like a Matrix-type plug in … something where it’s actually plugged into your brain – that’s where we sort of turn a corner and say that things in virtual reality are much more real than they were before,” he said. “That line is somewhere out there in the technological ether.”

Experiments with haptic technology – such as a vest that allows a player to feel when their character gets kicked or punched – might mean that technological ether is closer than we think.

“The willingness for companies to build into haptic spaces makes it more possible for women to be physically assaulted as well as virtually assaulted, which is creepy beyond creepy,” said Fox.

Virtual defenses

While virtual worlds may be vulnerable to the same negative human behaviors that the real world faces, they also include potential solutions that do not exist in real life – like virtual shields and super powers.

When the developers of QuiVR, Aaron Stanton and Jonathan Schenker, learned about Belamire’s experience of harassment, they updated the game’s code to include an expanded “personal bubble” that they believe will prevent future gropings.

We ask players to suspend disbelief over their own person … developers have a responsibility to provide a safe haven Aaron Stanton, QuiVR developer

“I felt irritated and frustrated and helpless on her behalf,” said Stanton. “Just imagining and putting myself in that position – it lasted with me.”

Stanton and Schenker began thinking about ways to address the psychological impacts of being harassed in VR.

“VR, unlike other digital experiences, asks the player to give a great deal of control over to the game. We’re asking them to suspend disbelief over their own person,” said Stanton. “I think if you’re going to ask someone to do that, the developers have a great deal of responsibility to provide a safe haven.”

The pair came up with the idea of a “power gesture” – a physical movement a player can make within the game to activate their personal bubble as if it were a super power.



“It’s active re-empowerment – something that they can do to reclaim power for themselves with a strong visual component that clearly transacts power back to them,” Stanton explained.

The pair plan to open-source the code for the gesture and are proposing that other developers consider adapting it to their own games. They have written about their proposal for the power gesture as a universal “911” for VR on the industry site UploadVR, and the response so far appears to be positive.

“I absolutely love this feature idea … it is so innovative and powerful,” said Belamire. “Getting too close? Zap, now the harasser has disappeared from my world.”