When author and gamer Jordan Belamire tried the VR game QuiVr in multiplayer mode, she was sexually assaulted by another user called BigBro4 42.40 ‘Virtual’ makes it sound like it isn’t real – but it felt real to Belamire. And no wonder. VR is meant to feel real, and it can be so successful at tricking your brain that it is being explored as a treatment for PTSD, phobias, even phantom-limb syndrome.41 To be fair to the male designers of QuiVr, they had an excellent and proactive response to Belamire’s blog.42 They immediately redesigned their ‘Personal Bubble’ setting (in which other player’s hands disappear if they come close to your face) to cover the entire body and so make such groping impossible. But as they themselves noted, while they had thought ‘of the possibility of some silly person trying to block your view with their hands and ruining the game’, they hadn’t thought of extending the fading function to the rest of the body. How, they asked, ‘could we have overlooked something so obvious?’ Fairly simply, to be honest. Henry Jackson and Jonathan Schenker are clearly well-meaning men who don’t intend to shut women out. But it’s Sergey Brin and the pregnancy parking all over again: even the best of men can’t know what it’s like to go through the world as a person with a body which some other people treat as an access-all-areas amusement arcade. This just isn’t something that Jackson and Schenker have to face on a regular basis, and therefore it really isn’t all that surprising that they missed ‘something so obvious’.
Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women