Virtual Reality and Games: Ethics, Law and Society

MostMost of the legal and ethical questions raised by games and virtual reality (VR) are old questions. Who may say what, and who decides? What may a company learn about the people using its product? Who gets left out when a product is designed? What may one person do to another? The technology changes where the lines fall, and sometimes moves them somewhere the existing rules weren't written to reach.old questions, new contexts

This page sets out why VR in particular changes those lines, and introduces four pages that follow one question each: freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility and inclusion, and ethics and human rights. Each can be read on its own.

Three Properties That Change the Questions FoundationalKnowledge that endures for decades — core principles

LemleyLemley and Volokh's survey of VR and augmented reality (AR) law makes a useful distinction between "new takes on classic legal questions" and controversies that are new because they arise in privately run virtual spaces¹. Three properties of VR account for most of the second kind.

• Embodiment and presence. A headset user has a body in the virtual space, tracked from their own head and hands, and the experience is built to feel like being there. Madary and Metzinger identify the illusion of embodiment as the main reason VR raises risks that film and flat-screen games don't, including changes in behaviour that persist after the headset comes off².
• Continuous sensing. To render the scene at all, a headset has to track head position, hand position and often gaze many times a second, and cameras map the room around the user. That stream is a by-product of the device working. Slater and colleagues point out that motor actions and eye movements form a "kinematic fingerprint"³.
• Private ownership of shared space. Social VR worlds are owned and run by companies. Their terms of service, moderation tools and software defaults do the work that public law does in a public square.

Each of the four issues comes out of one or more of these properties:

The diagram also shows why the four issues keep running into each other. Harassment in social VR is a speech question and a safety question at once because the harasser's avatar shares space with the target's tracked body. Accessibility depends on embodiment because a VR interface assumes a body that can stand, turn, reach and see in stereo. Privacy and human rights meet in the sensing stream, because data collected to draw the next frame can also be used to identify, profile or influence the person wearing the headset.the headset sees what you see, in real time

Games and VR: Overlapping, Not Identical Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

MostMost of what follows applies to online games played on a flat screen too. Voice chat, player-built content and moderation are speech issues in any multiplayer game; remappable controls and subtitles matter whether or not a headset is involved; telemetry raises privacy questions on any platform. VR intensifies each of them. Blackwell and colleagues, interviewing social VR users, found that synchronous voice, presence and embodiment made harassment feel more immediate and more physical than in text-based spaces⁴. The pages in this set use flat-screen games where they give the clearest example (accessibility work on console games is far more developed than in VR, for instance) and VR where the headset changes the answer.

Who Is Responsible for What Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

ResponsibilityResponsibility in this area is spread across several parties, and a recurring problem is that each can point at the others.

Students building VR or game projects sit in the first row. The pages in this set end with what each issue means for someone in that position.

The Four Pages FoundationalKnowledge that endures for decades — core principles

• Freedom of Expression in Virtual Spaces: why constitutional speech protections mostly don't apply inside a privately owned world, how moderation is layered from law down to the individual user, and why harassment is itself a threat to expression.
• Privacy in VR: When the Body Becomes the Data: what a headset collects, how little motion data it takes to identify someone, and why the legal category of that data depends on what it's used for.
• Accessibility and Inclusion in Games and VR: case studies from console and PC games, the state of VR accessibility, design practices, and representation.
• Ethics and Human Rights in Virtual Reality: when a virtual experience counts morally as a real one, the gamer's dilemma, informed consent, and a human-rights frame for platforms.

Related Topics

• Building for Immersive Platforms: engine choice, and the data, embodiment and wellbeing risks the engine doesn't handle.
• Virtual Reality: A History of Premature Arrivals: how adoption has gone in practice, which bounds how far any of these issues reach.
• Being the God of a Virtual World: the ethics of running a persistent world, from someone who has.
• Legal Framework in Computing: the general legal obligations behind several of these pages.
• Professional Ethics: codes of conduct for computing professionals.

References