"Power Gesture" for avoiding griefers (and how to adapt this to the Go)

I just ran across this very interesting article about how the developers of QuiVr added a nifty feature to empower players who were being harassed.

In short, they added a cool "power gesture" (controllers together, pull both triggers, and then pull controllers apart) which creates a sort of protective force field around you. Other players fade out and are muted when they get too close, while this effect is active (and similarly, you disappear to them). This eliminates most forms of harassment, and more so, does it in a way that makes the player feel empowered rather than victimized.

I really dig it, and I'd like to see it catch on. (To that end, the QuiVr guys contributed source to VRTK.)

But my current preferred platform is the Oculus Go. It has only a single controller rather than two. So we'd need a different gesture — something that invokes that same "creating a force bubble" feeling, and doesn't interfere with normal gameplay.

Any ideas?

 

I don't know how hard it'd be to track, but you could have that as a circular motion in front of you with the main button held down, sort of like Dr. Strange opening a portal.

 

I like that. I might try taking it one step further: trace a circle, followed by a forward push. That makes it even less likely to be triggered accidentally, and also maybe enhances that feeling of empowerment, like you're a Jedi doing a force push or something. (Though like you, I don't know how hard that would be to track with a 3DOF controller.)

Of course you'd need to be trained on the gesture if it's going to do you any good when you really need it. Gestures in general are not very discoverable. I guess that early in the game, we should have some sort of comical "griefer" character that tries to get in your face, concurrent with some instructions about how to banish it via the gesture.

 

Personally I think I'd rather have an in-game "AR Mode" that could be toggled on with options that appear for any player I look at. Then just pick from text menu items, like FULL IGNORE to make a problem player disappear from your world completely or FORCE FIELD IGNORE to do the fancy fade out thing.

When we get better finger tracking, I'd like an option to give that person the appropriate digit to activate it.

 

Yeah, that'd be convenient. But somehow not as satisfying as doing a power gesture, I think.

I thought the developers were really insightful here — it's more about emotion than logic. Logically, the other player manipulating his controllers so as to cause polygons to be drawn in certain ways on your ocular screens can't hurt you. It's just pixels. You could just ignore it.

But emotionally, you're getting e-groped, and it feels like a violation. You try to get away but the other (probably more experienced at the game) player keeps following and persisting in the unwanted behavior. Now sure, you could open up a menu and pick "IGNORE" and make the problem stop, and from a logical point of view, that's all that's needed. But that only addresses the logical problem, not the emotional one.

The emotional need is to make the player feel powerful again — to let them come away from the encounter with a sense of victory rather than defeat. To create that emotion, I think everything from how you trigger the feature to the accompanying graphical & auditory effects are important.

(If you haven't actually read the article yet, I recommend it — they explain it better than I'm doing.)

But note that we don't want to make the player powerful by somehow reversing the roles, allowing the victim to bully the griefer. That probably leads to a negative cycle. So, when if you activate the effect on me, you see a force bubble expanding rapidly outward and causing me to dissolve as it hits me. But I merely see you disappearing in a popping bubble, as if you've just warped to another dimension.

Hah, you're not the first to suggest that, either.

 

I think that's TBD. Like, I get the idea of it and it sounds good on paper, but when you want to ignore someone, you may just want it done and over with quickly without an elaborate interaction. Just my personal preference, but I'd rather have a hard menu item I can very quickly get to rather than try to remember some crazy gesture. Of course, the games and experiences will likely provide multiple ways to do the same thing, so it's not like you have to do just one or the other.

It would be interesting to hear once that sort of thing is implemented how many players prefer a quick-and-dirty (but straightforward) solution versus gestures.

I could see several overloaded gestures. Like a "backhand" move to swat the person out of the way, a "squeeze with your fingers" move to squeeze them down to nothing, a "flick" to flick them away like a paper football, maybe even a "kick to the groin" move, haha.

I think that sort of thing is going to vary wildly between players/participants. I suppose we won't know how effective that is emotionally without a decent amount of real-world usage and feedback.

I kind of don't like the "everyone gets faded out" bubble, since you probably only want to filter out the baddies.

 

True. And of course any gesture interface requires some training, or it's pretty much useless.

On the other hand, I do hold out hope for some standard gestures, that you can expect to work in most environments. Just like on desktop, we expect to be able to move a cursor with the mouse, select or drag things via click-drag, etc. Similarly, I hope in VR/AR we will eventually settle on some standard gestures for common tasks. I suspect that won't happen until we have ubiquitous Leap Motion-style hand tracking, but still, I applaud the effort to get the ball rolling now.

Hah, yes, I suppose so.

Maybe so, but that's no excuse for not giving it our best shot from the beginning.

It only fades out people within a certain radius, basically in your personal space. They reappear if they move a comfortable distance away (and fade out again if they get too close). And I think there may be ways to whitelist friends, if you really want them to be able to get that close.

 

I suppose I was thinking in terms of the audio as much as anything. Like, I don't want to hear simply a "faded out" jerk, I want him or her silent.

 

Oh yeah. No argument there.