{"id":6654,"date":"2022-02-08T18:52:22","date_gmt":"2022-02-09T00:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.zoha-islands.com\/?p=6654"},"modified":"2022-02-08T18:52:22","modified_gmt":"2022-02-09T00:52:22","slug":"exclusive-virtual-world-vet-warned-meta-about-avatar-harassment-in-the-metaverse-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/exclusive-virtual-world-vet-warned-meta-about-avatar-harassment-in-the-metaverse-years-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"EXCLUSIVE: Virtual World Vet Warned Meta About Avatar Harassment in the Metaverse Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

But Long-Known Best Practices Were Not Prioritized<\/h3>\n
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\"Horizon<\/p>\n

If you’ve been following the news about Facebook\/Meta’s metaverse project lately, you’ll recall the slew of bad press when a female user was sexually assaulted in Horizon Worlds<\/a>, leading the company to hastily add an avatar “boundary” system<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And if you’ve been following virtual world\/metaverse development for any substantial amount of time, you’ve probably been wondering why Meta allowed this to happen at all. Understanding and preparing for avatar-to-avatar harassment, especially directed at female avatars, is a fundamental<\/em> challenge. How did a company spending billions of dollars on making a metaverse platform of its own somehow miss lesson #1 from Metaverse 101?<\/p>\n

As it turns out, Meta was<\/em> warned about this many times — by a well-known virtual world veteran who was a senior member of the Oculus team. But somehow, his warnings, recommendations, and best practice summaries were not centered. And definitely not put into place.<\/p>\n

“I was literally banging the drum at Oculus Connect two years in a row,” Jim Purbrick<\/a> tells me, with evident frustration, even sending along the talk he gave on the subject at Facebook’s own conference back in 2016. (Watch below.) “I also told every new Oculus employee I met to read My Tiny Life<\/em> in addition to Ready Player One<\/em>, but the message didn’t reach every part of the organization, sadly.”<\/p>\n

My Tiny Life<\/em><\/a>, of course, is Julian Dibbell’s classic account of virtual world sexual assault… from the 1990s<\/em>. Yes, the problem has been well-known and documented for that long.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Purbrick, as regular readers know, was an early developer at Linden Lab<\/a>, going on to consult with CCP, the developers of Eve Online, before joining the Oculus team. He also documents virtual world\/metaverse best practices on his blog here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And when he joined Facebook’s XR team, Purbrick took pains to carry over the wisdom learned from Second Life and from the knowledge base of virtual world development in general:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/a>\n