The reality behind VR

Edit: 10/27/2024 - title, length, and content

Edit: 5/14/2024 - title

Edit: 4/19/2024 - title

Edit: 4/18/2024 - content

Edit: 4/3/2024 - length and content

:

This might seem pointless to bring up on a site like this.  The whole thing could probably be boiled down to a short paragraph about being severely foolish online.  But there's depth to this and I feel that I need to let it out.

This experience has made me reflect on a lot of personal things, like my views on life and my overall pursuit of happiness.  I've analyzed what stirs my ambitions and whether or not they've been driven by the right reasons.  The analysis of it is an ongoing thing in my head.  Social anxiety and the general excitement of interacting with people plays a big role and so does a lifelong desire to overcome it.

Everyone has a dark side.  Some of us are just more in touch with it than others.  Regardless how we interact with the people that are, and whether it's with the aid of technology or not, we never can truly understand what's going on in someone's head.  Using technology doesn't make it easier to figure people out; it's only a substitute for not being in the direct presence of someone.  Maybe the physical distance and separation from being in person from someone about these topics helps us talk more openly and freely about it.  Who knows.  We can let the experts research that.

There are all kinds of reputable interactive platforms that bring people together to collaborate online.  Yet despite growing trends and capabilities to do so, nothing will ever stop a bad situation from emerging when a person decides to engage with others on those platforms where users can freely choose any identity to use.  Just like here at chess.com, most of us are aware of fake accounts and people that crave attention.  Other sites offer more than just text exchanges and picture exchanges like here.  However, on some of the heavily immersive virtual reality platforms like the ones which have realtime interactions in high-resolution graphics with life-like worlds, it's dangerously more engaging to meet anyone where the potential for misunderstood interactions with strangers can evolve.  In these sort of fantasy places it's all about the discovery of, and getting to know, an anonymous stranger and connecting with the dark side of someone that truly excites us.

Deciphering from those who have ulterior motives is hard to do in places like this because there is no way for trust to be established.  Even if they seem normal it can all be an act.  The only way to trust someone in a place like this is to prove it from the outside.  

An immersive VR environment can poison the mind.  Repeated exposure to the temptation they cause combined with the exciting ideas and situations strangers share in secrecy feeds wonder and heightens excitement.  Over time, any normal person is susceptible to turning into someone they aren't if they operate in anonymity in dark places that harbor interactions with complete strangers.  In anonymity, we feel open to state whatever is on our mind with no consequences.  There is a sense of relief that happens when this occurs, and it can become a true source of gratification.  There are other reasons why we fall victim to this sort of behavior as well, but it's mostly about discovering and revealing secrets in anonymity since it's normally not acceptable to open up about it in the real world.  It can also go much further with deceptive people as forms of amusement and crazy illegal activity.  This kind of behavior runs rampant in places like this leading these manipulative people to gain pleasures from, say, messing around with someone's head over a period of time.  But if we all knew this kind of behavior was viral in places like this then no one would ever take any interaction seriously.  All I'm saying here is you can't be naive and let your guard down if you're engaged in a place like this.  Not with anyone, ever.

I am not advocating for such places to be banned, I'm instead bringing awareness about what happens inside them so people can avoid the emotional and psychological trauma that can occur when your imagination is left wondering who these people really are behind the scenes.  Your mind will tell you the person is real in cases where you grow to adore someone that seems to be real, seems stable, and that you seem to connect deeply with.  But your mind will work against you and it will drive you endlessly insane when you come to learn that the person you thought was real never intended to have anything more than a virtual connection in a game about fulfilling their own selfish desires.

These observations and analysis I'm giving are not based on things I've heard from friends and coworkers.  This whole thing I'm writing about is a true story that I experienced this year.  I'm writing about it not just for therapy but for those of you who fall into a category of exploring online curiosities in exciting places so that you can avoid having a traumatic outcome like I did.

These places are truly not suited for the honest-minded individual to explore.  If you're one of them, and if you maintain this honest mindset as you embark on journeys with other users in your encounters, it's likely that emotions will get in the way and the imagination will play a major factor after an exciting acquaintance is made.  Growth from that "connection" is what I warn about - and I'll get into this later on.  But inevitably it's the honest person that will be out-numbered by a greater proportion of mischievous users whose motives are far more difficult to understand than your own harmless curiosity.  In my case, it caused a lopsided "relationship" to form which ultimately caused a heart-wrenching situation that rattled me to the core.  I felt so drawn to her that I was forced to make a decision to walk away.  She told me we could never meet in real life and I could not bare the pain that this was causing me.  The excitement I had with her, both from her making my fantasies come true and from her becoming someone I could genuinely talk to about anything, was something I had never experienced in life before.  I felt my soul connect with hers.  Leaving her led to such emotional devastation for me that it altered my behaviors at home.  It was the most traumatic experience I ever experienced behind a computer screen. 

What's worse were the lingering obsessions I had about her in the months that followed.  What I was doing about them, how I thought I had a grip on managing them, and how far I was willing to go to contain them, were by far the most difficult things I ever had to manage mentally in my life.  Coping with all of this was on the scale of coping with the death of a parent.  The loss and grievance I had about losing her was significantly painful.  It still bares a cost on me emotionally as I edit this post.

But how?  How could something like this get so out of hand?  Who's fault was it?

I consider myself a pretty smart and respectful guy with a lot of common sense.  I am also a very transparent and violently honest person, which, as you can imagine, didn't quite work out for me in such a place.  It's true that it's rare for me to tell a lie.  Even joking around, I have trouble telling people something that could be interpreted as 'not true.'  Honesty has always been a part of my personality and is just a part of my DNA - a reason why I often get jealous, hurt, and fooled. It's because I live a successful life in the real world and things can be verified in reality.  I have a great family, a great career, and have just about everything a guy could want to achieve because I mastered the art of working hard to get what I want.

The real world is where we belong.  Things are what they are in reality and the way they should be because that's where we are from.  We face consequences when we do things in the real world and the things we want are hard to acquire.  Things can be verified and trusted in reality.  The real world has natural breaks on all things that we desire.  Money.  Love.  A good physique so you look good in the mirror.  You can't get these these things without overcoming the obstacles in front of them.  Natural breaks are everywhere in reality and it's those obstacles that make it hard for us to fulfill our desires.  Even behaviors.  We'll get criticized for our opinions when we speak up, so we learn to be cautious about stating our opinions to those who are temperamental and to those we care about.  We get judged by our demeanor and reactions to unplanned situations, so we learn to be professional about them with family, friends, and coworkers.  We get hurt when we feel rejected, and so we learn to anticipate hurdles to avoid facing embarrassment from failure.  This is what the real world teaches us.

You can sort of get where I'm going with this.  Some of us want to obtain our desires with less natural resistance and look at technology as a means to accomplish it.  Online interactions between people have less natural breaks on our desires.  Our interactions online don't always face these challenges and so we feel like we can act differently with no consequences.  All gas, no breaks, no consequences - this is a recipe for all kinds of bad behavior, deception, and mind-shifting beliefs about how people are in the real world.  If we take this a step further and join a community that harvests this sort of activity, such as those which have a free sign-up process that require only an email account for registration and no other forms of account verification, users can become anyone they want to be in a world that lets them behave anyway they want to behave where their imaginations become the only restraint that can get in their way.  Here, when the temptation and excitement grows among meeting unverified users, the truth behind what is being discussed can never be validated or verified in real life to be true.  And on top of it all, while all this insidious behavior happens around the clock, behind the curtains we are letting our guard down and are letting those who control the platform to take full advantage of us by allowing them to capitalize on our desires.  They observe them, they make capabilities to enhance our desires hard to acquire - a feature to unlock, and they monetize on those capabilities.  The wizardry behind this tactic is a strategic bet by the creators that the exciting experiences users will gain when acquiring such capability will make them want to use them again to enhance their overall experience in such a captivating world.  They are in essence manipulating the users on multiple levels.  They are giving the users a taste of what could happen at first, then they make them pay for a better capability once they see others using it, and when the desire to acquire them outweighs the curiosity, the use of them triggers emotional experiences to take place that they can't break away from and the addiction starts.  Drug dealers basically do the same thing.

These clever people bank on revenue streams when people get hooked to their interactive online services and some of them have gamified the user experience so well that users even expect to pay more for certain things to be available to enhance their experience.  Any platform that uses it's own in-game currency is a big red flag for compulsive behaviors to develop from this.  This gamification process will drive all kinds interest, like saving to unlock a very desirable item as you gain experience points and convert them to credits in a RPG-like system.   In many cases when this gamification hooks a user to come back and continue their progress toward a task, the users themselves aren't expecting to feel satisfaction and never come back.  Instead, they're already planning to start something new and expand the journey they were on and to build the reputation they already started when social networking capabilities are involved.  This becomes a very desirable outlet to escape from reality.

The time spent interacting with immersive software and with unknown users worsens when these interactive environments have life-like scenery and avatars.  Combined with a goal or an objective, these effects can pull you in further.  Quests.  Journeys.  Group events.  Races.  All these things combined with life-like sounds, and rich ambient environmental effects, can make these immersive environments seem more appealing to live in than the real world, especially when users begin to learn about each other, read profiles, communicate, and become connections.

It's common these days to create an alternate identity and to maintain that alternate identity's reputation in unverified places like this.  Again, this chess site is a very basic example of that.  But others like the ones you don't normally see advertised are developed to play on emotions of excitement, lust, adventure and fantasy.  These are the darker platforms that are meant to draw in an audience of users who are susceptible to the wonders of the imagination.  The spicy content that can be found in a massively immersive online interactive platform can easily allow users to do anything they want with their imaginations and with no supervision.  This is the kind of danger we need to watch out for - but some of us can't help ourselves - and would rather explore it and thrive on it. There is a deep threat that these kinds of interactive environments can have on us psychologically, where the wonders of the mind become the source of an objective, and they're not only threatening to our values, morals, and beliefs, they're changing our perception of reality and what we really supposed to do in it. 

I never really seemed to care enough to weigh the consequences of this until after I joined such a place.  And generally speaking, why should someone like me be concerned about consequences anyway if it ultimately fulfills a desire?  If it makes you happy then what's the big deal, right?  Right.  That was my way of thinking in the beginning.

I suppose common sense escapes us when we're excited.  Some have more control than others, but many of us don't and let an immersive experience carry us away.  I'm at the point in my life where I can honestly admit that I have a problem with this.  Excitement has steered my behavior off track so many times in the past that when I look back on it the pattern is obvious.  But it only became obvious when someone professional pointed that out to me.  I couldn't really figure this out on my own even though it was right there in front of me the whole time.

I had an experience in the not-so-distant past that made me forget about who I was when it was happening, and because I did, I am now paying a hefty price for it through ongoing obsessions that sometimes can't resolve on their own.  No one was there to intervene and remind me about what was going on and where I was when it was happening.  Even if someone was, I probably wouldn't have let them.  That's how drawn in to her I was.  I thought I could figure out a way to establish trust with people in this place.  Trust is impossible to establish inside such a place since everyone is unverified.  Even she tried to warn me at one point, telling me repeatedly that "I am not what you're making me out to be in your head."  But I was too far gone when that point was raised, which were among a sea of other good points she made about my desires.  She succeeded in convincing me that she cared. She openly said she was concerned about me when I was honest about how I felt about her.  I later came to realize that her authenticity was questionable toward the end since she wouldn't talk to me from the outside.  No real pictures were exchanged.  No real names were exchanged.  It drove me crazy.  Her kindness was only deepening the problem I was facing with her and my honesty led me to tell her things that I told no one else before.  Yet I still kept at it, even after we had our first break.  I felt something very deep with her that I truly never experienced before.

We are emotional creatures first, logical creatures second when we encounter anything new or unfamiliar to us.  Not realizing the dangers of having excitement drive decisions is really what my problem is all about.  I mean, what kind of idiot guy could possibly develop a heart-pounding, stomach-turning, emotional connection to a strange female user that he knew he never could meet in person, never see a picture of, and could only speak to through an online virtual reality platform?  That would be me, the kind of guy that doesn't know how to put the breaks on excitement.  It seems ridiculous to even think that something like this can happen to someone who has his feet planted well in real life, but it did, and it still haunts me many weeks later (6 months now, as of the above October edit).

A half year has gone by and it still burns like hot radiating coal inside me when I think about the whole experience and what happened.  What still burns is the nature of the encounters I had with her.  How rare it was to connect with, and have such deep unfiltered thoughts with, such an incredibly exciting, unjudgmental and graciously kind woman that had such a dark side like my own. What burns is the mystery she made about herself and how I wonder so frequently about what she said about her real life and if what she said was true.  This causes a relentless fight I have to manage in my head whenever I play back certain things she said to me.  She said it with such conviction.  Her voice was always in the right pitch, in the professional voice of a teacher that she told me she really was.

Perhaps the excitement I heard in her voice was interpreted to literally as the real thing on my end whenever we spoke.  There was an extraordinary amount of excitement that was generated from the conditions we met in, and it came out through our voices whenever we spoke.  She liked speaking to me, and I know for a fact that she liked the way I sounded to her.  It was also extremely rare to actually speak to strangers like the way we did in such a dark place.  We just had chemistry.  The bonding that happened with her was something that I hadn't experienced with anyone like this before.  It was the hours of voice conversations that did it.  Voice can reveal so much more about a person than text can. 

There were so many conversations that we had. There were dozens of (what seemed to be) open and honest voice conversations that lasted in 1 hour durations two to three times per week over the course of 6 weeks. And dare I even say that there were tens of thousands of words written in chats with many details whenever we couldn't speak through our microphones freely. Yes she was a virtual online acquaintance, and yes she was unverified and therefore could not be trusted. But my emotions took over and she got deep in my head. Our long conversations made our time together significant and very real. It lasted a good six weeks. But there is a whole lot more to this story that I can't write about here, including my personal real-life situation and how much of it was my fault vs. her fault vs. the game's fault.  I just wanted to see if anyone else has ever been faced with a similar online situation like this before and how you had to deal with it afterwards (after realizing the situation couldn't be brought into reality).

i could never say who my crush is, and yes im gay so i would be cheating on my gf :0

@pawnsonthefl00r this happened to you too?

many times, untill i found my interests with my gf and fell in love, now i like someone else too :0

Re-read this and fixed it up for a more general discussion. I should just delete it.

ignore basix they are stupid and low minded

The whole time you spend online is basically virtual relationships. Whether it's deep or shallow, we spend a lot of time on it. If it captures your interest and becomes your priority, doesn't that make it real to you? In this age, you can make almost anything you want real, or at least give it the semblance of reality to convince yourself. The question becomes, what do you want to be real, and how can you make it real? Hope that's relevant to your point...

Looking up a quote...

not really part of the conversation but that's what AI and technology's gonna be like in the future when it controls even more of us

There's only one category of phenomena: real phenomena. Unreal phenomena don't exist.

"Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth." - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged from the chapter "This is John Galt Speaking"

To Tom's point, yes - absolutely. Time spent in a virtual world is still time spent on something, no matter what it is. In my case I prioritized online activities over things that couldn't be fulfilled in reality, which was the source of the problem I had. The companionship is what made it real and it can be argued that what we had was "real" to some extent. But operating in anonymity is simply not a good habit. That is a big part of the situation here that I didn't really get into.

#1 So was it even a real person?

“The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity." - Ayn Rand

Fortunately you can learn something from every experience. As George Harrison puts it

Since our problems have been our own creation
They also can be overcome
When we use the power provided free to everyone -
This is Love

Love knows no boundaries

Thanks for the comments on this.

Since I originally posted this in the forums, I wound up speaking to several people that I trust, including a professional. The common link among everyone I've told this story to can be summarized to this:  If you can't validate the person you have feelings for in real life, it's not worth the heartache. In other words just let it go. But it's not that easy. This situation deals heavily with unresolved questions I had about who she was in real life, and how much trust I could give her while she wanted to maintain her anonymity. Those struggles are what I continue to wrestle with knowing I had to leave her behind.

#14 of course she was a real person. That's the whole reason why I wrote about this.