Bias in VR early adopters

During my current research project I had to examine the store page for every current title on the Oculus and Vive stores, in doing so I had to view star ratings and comments. Unfortunately, my initial interpretation of the collected data would indicate that there is a strong bias amongst the VR user base (whom I will classify as early adopters) towards certain media (and conversely, against others).

Almost every Shooty Shooty murder game had positive reviews, and the few negative comments seemed constructive rather than critical. Meanwhile, narrative VR stories that had few game mechanics and touched on social awareness topics such as rape culture, climate crisis, racism, civilian casualties, etc were given very harsh and critical feedback. Some of the feedback was indicative of 'trolling behaviour' such as a post that said "1/10 can't even pick up the bottle to hit her with".

As a male, who enjoys video games and is quite a fan of stabby stabby and shooty shooty formats I am well aware of the 'culture' that exists in those spaces. Alas, I am also a storyteller, a filmmaker, and an academic who strives to learn and understand the variety of human experience. I always want to tell not only my own stories but also the full tragedy of human existence in my storytelling. We absorb new information that governs our personality and indeed our soul with every interaction, there has been many an occasion when I have read or watched a book or film and walked away with a deeply unsettling understanding of a horrible situation, or a wonderfully enlightened understanding of an alternative point of view.

We can learn useful technical skills like problem solving, how to think like an engineer, and how to understand greater physics phenomena by have their principles included in media we consume. A good example is that we all understand the concept of what time travel is even if we don't understand how it could work and none of us have ever actually experienced it. But through our media and stories we have been exposed to the concept and can understand what people mean when they say time travel.

Some argue that movies cant influence people (mostly as an excuse for overly horrific media or media that could desensitisation impressionable young people to violence), but why then is a Superbowl ad worth millions of dollars on the presumption it will encourage me to buy a product?

I digress from the main point of this article though. There is a bias against certain types of content that have strong potential to be powerful in VR and to offer an opportunity for change and for more individual humans to grow and become better people through exposure to those stories. So we need to promote those stories and ensure that the people who may want to support those stories are aware of them and that they exist in VR. We don't want the socially enlightened people in the world to feel alienated from VR because the top 20 games are all different ways of murdering imaginary people.

Find a socially progressive person and show them content like Wolves in the Walls or Queerskins to show them the storytelling potential of VR is not limited to war and gore.