Identity and Community in Virtual Reality
How the Apps you Use Affect your Behavior
This is Part One in a series about social virtual reality. Read Part Two here.
In virtual reality, you can be anyone you want to be. Like in online games and on social media, the physical world does not have to directly impact the kind of person you are in the virtual world. You can create personas that you shift between as you interact with different people and different communities, all of which fade away as you swap between applications or turn off your computer. This is a common discussion that comes up about the internet and social networks — think catfishing, fandom personas, and influencers — but what is less often discussed is how it relates to the current state of virtual reality (VR). What design decisions in VR social applications affect our behavior? More importantly, how can we change the way we relate to other people through these VR social applications?
The Impact of Existing VR Social Spaces on Behavior
In recent years, we’ve started to see the effect that social media has on the way that we interact with each other. The designs of those platforms have affected our behaviors, our relationships, and our beliefs. It follows, then, that social applications in VR may have similar effects on our behavior.
What makes experiences feel more social? How do we as VR designers encourage prosocial behavior? What ramifications do our design decisions have on the way people treat each other?
I spent time in a few of the biggest social VR apps, trying to find interactions that I felt contributed to how the community interacted with each other. This is a short summary of my findings.
AltspaceVR
AltspaceVR created one of the oldest social VR apps; their app, which shares the name of the company, predates most, if not all, of the other apps explored in this article. After AltspaceVR had a brief period of funding uncertainty, it was eventually bought by Microsoft, who has largely left the VR company alone.
The most authentic interactions in the AltspaceVR app are linked to organized events where community leaders arrange meetups around a specific topic. AltspaceVR itself has also set up its own events. The company has invited celebrities like Reggie Watts to organize, promote, and perform in events. It also has hosted talks with industry leaders around interesting topics. When you open up the app to your own personal penthouse, you are quickly prompted to explore scheduled events and meetups. The community has also evolved to prioritize these events — concurrent user count is extremely low unless an event has been scheduled at that time. Worlds designed by AltspaceVR also cater to this. Virtually all the worlds created by AltspaceVR have interactive elements that lead to social interaction — campfires to sit around, discussion prompts, basketball half-courts to shoot around in, stages for performances, and many others.
While these interactive elements are social in nature, users can also turn them into opportunities to exhibit questionable behavior. One interaction is that other people can grab items right after you let go of them. This wouldn’t be such an issue except that the first interaction you learn is shooting a basketball — the purpose of which is immediately screwed up by someone who can grab the ball right out of your hands. Similarly, stages don’t keep people from entering them, so it’s up to the community to self-police if a disruptive user tries to take over the presentation. The problem is a lack of consequences. Unlike in the physical world, you’re not going to get hurt by attempting to interrupt a sport. Unlike a real show, bouncers or bodyguards aren’t available to restrain you from accessing specific areas and getting kicked from an event does not come with threats of arrest.
One way that AltspaceVR tries to combat this is through AltspaceVR 101 — a meetup designed to introduce new users to the social norms in AltspaceVR: how to find friends, how to use reactions, and how to block people. It is appropriately staged with community volunteers presenting a slide deck in front of a crowd of new users. The world that this presentation takes place in also gives users a special ability to indicate that they have a question, so presenters can easily structure Q and A sessions. Community leaders host this structured event as a way to prime new users on what behavior is acceptable and what behavior is unacceptable, essentially setting the stage for what people expect out of the app.
This meet up–centered design aims to combat two of the most common social VR problems — a dead community due to lack of concurrent users and the prevalence of antisocial behavior. Low user numbers at most times aren’t a problem when people are given advance notice to show up at a specific time. Similarly, when they are invested enough in the topic of conversation to show up at an event, they are more likely to exhibit prosocial behavior.
Facebook Spaces
Facebook Spaces creates a shared space that you can invite people you know to. It uses your Facebook friend list to generate the list of people you can invite to your space and uses your photos to offer you avatars that look like your actual physical appearance.
This results in only meeting with people in your social circle, which is limiting because it is restricted to people you know in the physical world who also have a VR headset. It also means that social hierarchies and social relationships that exist in your life are brought into VR. It is a tool for connecting people — an attempt to foster closer relationships by bringing them together in the same space.
The design of the app reflects this goal. It’s an intimate setting, with people taking their positions around a shared table. You directly manipulate objects in the space by picking them up and poking various options. The options for editing the room are meant to be collaborative: a pen to draw things in space, multiplayer games that take place on the table itself, and placing images as screens in the space so everyone can see them. Similarly, the way to document your time spent in the space is with a selfie — an intimate gesture that requires you to get into someone else’s personal space to get a photo together.
While this design lessens the likelihood of trolls or other bad actors — at least ones that you don’t already know about — this model of using existing Facebook friends results in poor engagement. Like the beginning stages of the internet, meeting with people you already know is only useful for the researchers working on it or companies with extremely early adoption — everyone else with a VR headset is unlikely to have an existing Facebook friend who is in a headset at the same time organically. Meeting someone in Facebook Spaces would require lots of preplanning and investment of time, money, or simply just spontaneous dumb luck. It’s an ambitious project and well-designed but one that may have come before the adoption rate of the technology was ready to support it.
OrbusVR
Note: This was written about the original launched OrbusVR. Orbus Reborn was recently launched and there have been many changes that affect how the community behaves and interacts with each other.
OrbusVR is an attempt to make a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) complete with different classes and leveling. It’s a bit different from the other apps I’ve been exploring since it’s a game with specific goals, but the design of these mechanics leads to some interesting social situations.
The first hint at social mechanics starts at the beginning. You are taught to wave at non-player characters (NPCs) in order to bring up dialogue — a natural, prosocial behavior that sets the tone for the types of social interactions you’ll encounter in the game.
As you progress through the tutorial, you are assigned a quest which pushes you to explore the world outside of the training area. The NPC gives you a brief and vague description on where to find the next step in your quest, which results in you stumbling down some stairs to a field right outside the starting village. This field is usually filled with veteran players where, due to a large concentration of training dummies, they can practice their skills at no risk.. They often point newcomers toward the quest objective required to finish the tutorial. These veteran players also often teach newcomers how to fight, how to cast spells, and how to survive in the world.
Relying on other players in order to progress in quests is unavoidable — as you pass level six, you receive quests that require you to either be a higher level than the area requires or to team up with someone else. This effect only gets more and more pronounced the more you level up, with large raid teams required for endgame events.
Player versus player (PvP) combat — something that can cause undue conflict between players, while often a priority for a subset of players — is opt in only and is not available to players until they reach areas that are at the level cap of 20. To instigate an attack on another player, you must find the setting for friendly fire and enable it. It turns PvP, a mostly antisocial behavior, into a deliberate choice that a player makes as opposed to something that can be triggered accidentally. Besides that, lands that allow PvP also have powerful monsters in them as well — monsters that require a party to defeat. This means that players who want to kill other players for their loot must also kill off the rest of their victim’s party before their party decides to kill them.
OrbusVR’s community and design explore how game design decisions can be used to influence social behaviors and community in VR. Many of these decisions can be replicated in nongame environments (e.g. providing newcomers with a task that can be made easier by asking veteran players) and could be interesting explorations for future VR social communities. OrbusVR does, however, benefit from the player base it attracts — gamers who have played massive multiplayer online games (MMOs) in the past. These players will be more knowledgeable about prosocial expectations and cues in virtual spaces compared to new gamers, leading to a quicker understanding of how to play collaboratively. OrbusVR is definitely not the most polished of games (although the upcoming expansion looks to be a bit more visually refined), but it’s obvious that a lot of care was put into how to get players to collaborate and play together nicely — maybe more so than even some of the core game mechanics.
VRChat
VRChat is arguably the most popular social app for VR. It gets many more users because you don’t require a VR headset to join in — the headset is purely for a more immersive experience and for more control over your avatar. It is much more freeform and much less curated than all the other spaces as users are given free rein over their avatars and what worlds they want to inhabit. You can use Unity to upload any 3-D model or 3-D environment to VRChat to use as your avatar or world.
This structure is more organic — it provides users with the tools to use VR in whatever way they want. VRChat is simply the engine that hosts and enables their interaction. Both users with VR headsets and those without can access any functionality, giving them a much larger user base. This has more flexibility because you can enter any public world you want, without limitations, and copy avatars of people that you encounter, which then opens you up to practically infinite numbers of experiences as more and more content is created.
However, the downside is that there is no cohesive design system between the worlds and the avatars of people you meet. This results in a hectic environment where avatars and worlds are often incongruous with each other. It is designed to appear undesigned — more accessible to users, more creative for users, and more accepting of faults. This is echoed by the fact that there are no preset games or talking prompts that you can pop up in the space — it is entirely up to the users to create their own content, jokes, and social hierarchies based off of quick or nonexistent introductions.
Having said that, when given a free sandbox with powerful tools, users copy their favorite characters to use as avatars, build entire worlds to make a simple joke, and find ways to make their avatars glitch to make memes. Since the content is not prescribed an aesthetic or a context by VRChat itself, the content that players create is more authentic to their interests and is more connected to what they’re personally invested in. They only join worlds and use avatars that they like rather than being constrained by the app’s limitations.
This, too, has a downside — players find it much easier to harass, demean, or embarrass others in the space. Because VRChat looks undesigned and hectic, it encourages users to be more over the top and obnoxious in order to gain attention — they play loud music, make loud remarks, and say crude jokes, all in order to stand out from all of the other avatars. This is made all the more prevalent because of the predominant user base, gamers who already have a reputation for being abusive. While the app itself doesn’t dictate the limits to what users can manipulate in the world, it’s up to individual moderators or victims to check each world and avatar to make sure it follows VRChat’s community guidelines. The VRChat Safety and Trust system relies on this — for users to reach nuisance rank, where their avatar is automatically hidden by default, other users must report them since users gain higher trust ranks simply by being in VRChat longer and interacting with other people who may just have the same level of comfort that the bad actor does.
There is one interesting design decision that aims to be a deterrent to that though — VRChat offers an option for personal space. If enabled, people who get too close to you will disappear when they’re in your personal space bubble. This means you can’t see what they’re doing, in case it’s inappropriate. To bring them back into view, you can either move away yourself or tell them to move away. This setting is turned on by default in order to protect new users who may not know what to expect from VRChat. However, this personal space option feels like a Band-Aid to the social issues of VRChat, and it’s a feature that power users often turn off.
VRChat is the most interesting and versatile social app for VR today. The ability to create worlds and customize avatars has opened up many people to new ways of working with 3-D models and game engines. However, with no real guidelines and the negative social behavior that’s encouraged by many users, the content and people are often too crude for my personal liking, and I struggle to find close connections because of this.
Where Thoughts Go
Where Thoughts Go is distinct from the other social spaces mentioned above. Users who enter the space are presented with a question. Around them are little orbs that they can touch, which then start playing a recording of someone else’s response to the prompt. It’s like an online forum, where users can share authentic stories and answers behind the veil of anonymity. It also is reminiscent of internet culture since you can be alone in a space yet can see the remains of people who accessed the community before you. For a brief period once you’ve heard all the authentic stories of people who accessed the app before you, you are invited to share your own stories and responses. Because of this ability to prime users with other people’s vulnerabilities, users are more inclined to share their own personal stories, resulting in a community that is based around authenticity and trust.
Unlike the other social VR apps mentioned, it doesn’t rely on having concurrent users to create a shared, meaningful space. Rather, it uses disconnection as a way to mediate the discussion. It is the permanence of what is said in this virtual world, as opposed to the fleeting exchanges that are prevalent in other social apps, that forces people to stop and think about what they are being presented with.
However, this is a very structured experience with little replayability — since every response is answering the same set of questions, you may find that you hear different responses, but the level of investment you have in those questions may not spark a higher level of interest when replaying the game. It doesn’t lend itself to the spontaneity of regular human interaction since the system is simply not flexible enough. It will always be a curated rather than natural way to find similar people to you.
Conclusion
Some similarities exist with these apps, but there are also many more differences. All these apps have considered the needs of their communities in order to design an app that best suits their users. Whether they are creating an app for a specific use case or are trying to accommodate the breadth of human communication, they have made design decisions to try to make sure that their target users feel the most comfortable within their virtual space.
Thank you for reading! In the next article, I’ll be suggesting a framework for understanding and designing social VR spaces based off patterns I found in these social VR apps.
Special thanks to Clint, Binh, CH, Norah, and everyone else who’s read through this, offered their insight, and suggested changes. Thanks to Rita Ray for editing and Kevin Hong for the illustrations.
