Blog Post 13

Continuing with the last post, I want to talk about the experience in Second Life as well. Throughout virtual reality, the virtual world setting had more options. Detailed settings in this game facilitated our conversation and made it easier for us to open up about ourselves. Although there were many positive aspects of Second Life, this time, I want to talk about a negative experience in virtual reality. 

As I mentioned last time, I could smoothly have a conversation with people. However, there was a man who was rude to me. Since I was planning to play the game for the assignments in this course, I didn’t carefully set up my profile and avatar’s appearance. Then the man taught me how to change those settings, so I tried to follow them. I was waiting for his instructions, but his suggestion was to follow his Instagram account. He said this is the easiest way to set up your profile, which sounded very suspicious. I didn’t feel like following him because we just met and had a few small conversations about our demographic information, such as ethnicity, gender, and age. I told him that I had logged out of my social media account for a while, which is true, and rejected his instruction. After the conversation, he insistently asked me for my profile picture and determined that I have a strict boyfriend. We hadn’t talked about our personal relationships, and I was not willing to share my personal information, so I just didn’t reply. He also determined my religion because I didn’t show my profile picture, which was disrespectful and made me feel uncomfortable. He also said that there’s got to be something wrong with me since I didn’t want to show my face. Then he mentioned to me that I must have criminal records. At this point, I had no idea what he was talking about because he was making assumptions and claims about me. I was aware that people could say some mindless things to another person on the Internet; his statements weren’t hurtful at all. Overall, I learned that it is inevitable to avoid communication difficulties with people in virtual reality and to have conversations that participants can always make sense of.