People here have probably played Everquest or Runescape or World of Warcraft or any number of MMO's. This is basically how I see "metaverse", just with a silly hat. The game world in WoW can feel pretty immersive, you can forget you're you for hours on end. It probably replaced real life for me to a far greater extent than the "Metaverse" ever will for people interacting with it because they'll probably do it for like, an hour a day or something.

In WoW you can lay down and people can repeatedly sit on you. They can walk through you. They can tell you to fuck off and eat shit, they can literally kill you in the game if they're on the opposing faction, etc.

And this is like, totally normal and fine. It's not offensive. I mean, in one way it is, but not in the 'this is despicable and must stop' way.

I get this sense that like, the Internet was all a game, and now nothing can be a game. It all has to _matter_. If someone tells you to suck a cock on Twitter, it's not just an insult, it's like, some big thing, it'll have a name, there'll be a whole movement, etc. It's hate speech, or it's misandrist, or it's this or it's that.

But in World of Warcraft you're a fat cunt and like, whatever.

Why can't people just chill out? What happened?

My theory involves the period where the line between "internet" and "regular" media evaporated. All media now considers the internet a first-class delivery platform. That wasn't compatible with the idea that the things on the internet default to being understood as frivolous and untrustworthy.

Like, yes, on a purely technical level it's compatible. We did once have an internet where it was the job of every single person or media outlet to earn their legitimacy to an audience who had a default-ignore attitude.

In practice, it was an incompatibility that caused force vectors in the world to evolve towards a solution. The goal condition being that frivolous "offline" media could go online without being exposed as frivolous bullshit. And the answer that fell out of the system was that everything became all serious all the time.

I don't have a good explanation, this idea is kinda fresh in my mind. But I think it's the forest containing the trees I used to complain about.

I feel the same way about suicide and gun violence after experiencing it with my brother and a few friends. It seemed so funny and stupid when I was a kid. Now it's like being stabbed in the gut.

Sexually assaulted in-game? In WoW?

Last time I checked, WoW does not have any player interactions, or assets, for the purpose of emulating sexual assault.

> When something like that has never happened to you it's really easy to just shrug it off as trivial or stupid. But, it really hurts when you've lived it.

Violence in general is even more common than sexual violence, leaving even more people traumatized.

Yet the vast majority of video games make that the sole mechanic of the player interacting with the in-game world.

People don't even have to interpret that into the sights/actions given, like the WoW sexual assault, it's openly and blatantly stated and endorsed.

Is that bad too? And why is that not worse than people imagining being sexually assaulted in a game, based on their very own, individual, trauma?

They have been working on it lately. Similar to Meta.

https://game-news24.com/2021/10/08/world-of-warcraft-emotes-...

But players using them in ways they were not originally intended is very much part of a game, it's very much a creative process that some players love going trough.

Removing that because a scant minority of people allegedly can't differentiate virtual imagination from the real world, strikes me as a line of reasoning very similar to that of the likes of a Jack Thompson, which is not a good thing.

Eventually it became clear that companies were effectively leaving money on the table by allowing some users to drive other users away, so they decided to stop that from happening.

I don't think there are enough users interested enough in their ability to call each other names to actually quit to influence companies to stop. E.g. I prefer less moderation because it's sometimes hilarious, but not enough to use that as a criteria for which games I'm going to play (for the most part).

I also think gaming became mainstream enough for media outlets to start reporting on games, and companies didn't want to be associated with the actions of users. Nobody wants to be the company that runs the game best known for its use of racial slurs. It was fine when gaming was niche enough that the only people who knew about that was gamers; it's a bigger problem when your investors become aware of how often people use the n word in your game.

Like a games community being declared "toxic" by bored game press having a slow day. That's just not good for business aka the stock price, friction like that needs to minimized and ultimately made impossible.

Which first started with censorship of in-game chats with bad-word filters, and by now we've reached a point where most AAA games don't even allow you to chat with the opposing team anymore; Too high is the risk of somebody getting offended.

This is also convenient on another end; The more you limit the players expression, the less of it you gonna have to moderate. People can't report other people for saying nasty things, when nobody can say anything!

Wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now there ain't even voice or team chat anymore, and the only way for players to express themselves individually, is buying DLC, like skins, animations and character voice lines.

It's not 1997. You can't pretend you've never heard of griefers, trolls, and other platform abusers. You have to think about spam and other misuse of your platform from the beginning, rather than trying to play catch-up continuously. It's like security: if you don't build it in, you can't layer it on later.

I wonder if there were any women on the team who designed this. They're the ones who will say, from personal experience, "What about cat calling? What about strangers following you? What about dick pics?" If you fill the room with men, you'll re-learn the hard way all the things people do to women that men don't see and women don't like to talk about. Not because it's rare but because it's ubiquitous.

Maybe it eventually evolves to everyone in separate pitch black and soundproof rooms sending messages in a web browser on Facebook.