Murder in virtual reality should be illegal
But this new form of entertainment is dangerous. The impact of immersive virtual violence must be questioned, studied and controlled. Before it becomes possible to realistically simulate the experience of killing someone, murder in VR should be made illegal.
The problem of what entertainment does to us isn’t new. The morality of art has been a matter of debate since Plato. ...But now, for the first time, technology promises to explode the boundary between the world we create through artifice and performance, and the real world as we perceive it, flickering on the wall of Plato’s cave.
By hijacking our capacity for proprioception – that is, our ability to discern states of the body and perceive it as our own – VR can increase our identification with the character we’re playing. The ‘rubber hand illusion’ showed that, in the right conditions, it’s possible to feel like an inert prosthetic appendage is a real hand; more recently, a 2012 study found that people perceived a distorted virtual arm, stretched up to three times its ordinary length, to still be a part of their body.
We must study the psychological impacts, consider the moral and legal implications, even establish a code of conduct. Virtual reality promises to expand the range of forms we can inhabit and what we can do with those bodies. But what we physically feel shapes our minds. Until we understand the consequences of how violence in virtual reality might change us, virtual murder should be illegal.
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