Keywords
space and place
COVID-19
social distancing
place attachment
How to Cite
Abstract
During the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic many governments imposed forced lockdowns and implemented social distancing measures. At the same time there was also a large increase in gaming sales, which was particularly pronounced in the Virtual Reality (VR) sector of the market. We hypothesize that this is no coincidence since VR immersion and the capability of inducing embodiment and a feeling of presence can mitigate the loss of contact with outside world. VR has social and spatial potential to provide space and place for human interactions in time when physical contracts are restricted. To investigate this, we analyse reviews of VRChat (a social VR game) posted on the Steam platform, both before and during the pandemic. Among several themes that were identified, we found indications that spatiality plays an important role in the players’ experience. Users describe virtual worlds of the game using emotional language that suggest bonding and presence of place attachment. In the reviews made during the pandemic there is a strong theme of safety associated with virtual places of VRChat – a replacement of physical space that is no longer accessible or is perceived as unsafe. At least for some users, VRChat has provided a sympathetic and comfortable environment during the pandemic to act as a surrogate for social interaction during social distancing and isolation. Future interviews with users are needed to extend and validate this preliminary research.
References
Ahn S., Kang J., Park S. 2017. What makes the difference between popular games and unpopular games? analysis of online game reviews from steam platform using word2vec and bass model. ICIC Express Letters 11, 1729–1737.
Bauder M. 2016. Thinking about measuring Auges non-places with Big Data. Big Data & Society, 3 (https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716665130).
Berry D. 2012. Glitch ontology. Stunlaw ( http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2012/05/glitch-ontology.html.
Bolan M. 1997. The mobility experience and neighborhood attachment. Demography, 34: 225–237.
Castronova E. 2007. Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality. Palgrave Macmillan.
Corbin J., Strauss A. 1990. Grounded theory research: Procedures, canons, and evaluative criteria. Qualitative Sociology, 13: 3–21.
Coulson M., Oskis A., Spencer R., Gould R.L. 2019. Tourism, migration, and the exodus to virtual worlds: Place attachment in massively multiplayer online gamers. Psychology of Popular Media Culture (https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000244).
Cresswell T. 2014. Place: an introduction. John Wiley & Sons.
Druzhinina I., Palma-Oliveira J.M. 2004. Radioactive contamination of wild mushrooms: a cross-cultural risk perception study. Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, 74: 83–90.
Evans L. 2018. The Re-Emergence of Virtual Reality. Routledge.
Evans L. 2019. Barriers to VR use in HE. [In:] Proceedings of the Virtual and Augmented Reality to Enhance Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Conference 2018. IM Publications Open LLP, p. 3–13 (https://doi.org/10.1255/vrar2018.ch2).
Evans L., Rzeszewski M. 2020. Hermeneutic Relations in VR: Immersion, Embodiment, Presence and HCI in VR Gaming. [In:] X. Fang (ed.), HCI in Games, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing, Cham, p. 23–38 (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50164- 8_2).
Fried M. 2000. Continuities and discontinuities of place. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20: 193–205.
Gao Z., Lee J.E., McDonough D.J., Albers C. 2020. Virtual Reality Exercise as a Coping Strategy for Health and Wellness Promotion in Older Adults during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 9, 1986 (https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm9061986).
Glaser B.G., Strauss A.L. 2017. Discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Routledge.
Gibson J.J. 1986. The ecological approach to visual perception. Lawrence Erlbaum Hillsdale, NJ.
Gustafson P. 2014. Place attachment in an age of mobility. [In:] C.M. Lynne, D.-W. Patrick (eds.), Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications. Routledge Oxfordshire, England, p. 37–48.
Halegoua G.R. 2020. The Digital City. NYU Press, New York.
Heidegger M. 1962. Being and time. Harper & Row, New York.
Kudryavtsev A., Stedman R.C., Krasny M.E. 2012. Sense of place in environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 18(2): 229–250.
Lanier J. 2017. Dawn of the new everything: A journey through virtual reality. Random House.
Lea M., Spears R. 1991. Computer-mediated communication, de-individuation and group decision-making. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 34, 2: 283301.
Leszczynski A. 2015. Spatial media/tion. Progress in Human Geography, 39: 729–751 (https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132514558443).
Lewicka M. 2011. Place attachment: How far have we come in the last 40 years? Journal of Environ-mental Psychology, 31: 207–230 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.10.001).
Lin D., Bezemer C.-P., Zou Y., Hassan A.E. 2019. An empirical study of game reviews on the Steam platform. Empirical Software Engineering, 24: 170–207 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-018-9627-4).
McVeigh-Schultz J., Márquez Segura E., Merrill N., Isbister K. 2018. What’s It Mean to “Be Social” in VR?: Mapping the Social VR Design Ecology. [In:] Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility – DIS ‘18. Presented at the the 19th In-ternational ACM SIGACCESS Conference, ACM Press, Hong Kong, China, p. 289–294 (https://doi.org/10.1145/3197391.3205451).
Marsh K.L., Johnson L., Richardson M.J., Schmidt R.C. 2009. Toward a radically embodied, embedded social psychology. European Journal of Social Psychology, 39: 1217–1225.
Muhanna M.A. 2015. Virtual reality and the CAVE: Taxonomy, interaction challenges and research directions. Journal of King Saud University-Computer and Information Sciences, 27: 344–361.
Rose-Redwood R., Kitchin R., Apostolopoulou E., Rickards L., Blackman T., Crampton J., Rossi U., Buckley M. 2020. Geographies of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dialogues Hum. Geogr. (https://doi. org/10.1177/2043820620936050).
Saker M., Frith J. 2020. Coextensive space: virtual reality and the developing relationship between the body, the digital and physical space. Media, Culture & Society 016344372093249 (https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720932498).
Seamon D. 1980. Body-subject, time-space routines, and place-ballets. [In:] A. Buttimer, D. Seamon (eds.), The human experience of space and place. St. Martin’s Press, New York, p. 148–165.
Slater M. 2003. A note on presence terminology. PRESENCE-Connect. URL (http://presence.cs.ucl.ac.uk/presenceconnect/articles/Jan2003/melslaterJan27200391557/melslaterJan27200391557.html; accessed: 8.02.20).
Slater M., Pérez Marcos D., Ehrsson H., Sanchez-Vives M.V. 2008. Towards a digital body: the virtual arm illusion. Front. Hum. Neurosci., 2 (https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.09.006.2008).
Stedman R.C. 2006. Understanding Place Attachment Among Second Home Owners. American Behavioral Scientist, 50: 187–205 (https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764206290633).
Steed A., Pan Y., Zisch F., Steptoe W. 2016. The impact of a self-avatar on cognitive load in immersive virtual reality. [In:] 2016 IEEE Virtual Reality (VR). Presented at the 2016 IEEE Virtual Reality (VR), p. 67–76 (https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2016.7504689).
Tuan Y.F. 1974. Space and place: Humanistic perspective. Progress in Geography, 6: 233–246.
Tuan Y.F. 1975. Place: An experiential perspective. Geographical Review, 65: 151–165.
Zook M.A., Graham M. 2007. The creative reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the privatization of cyberspace and DigiPlace. Geoforum, 38: 1322–1343.