People have killed others for more than many times in video games.
With the internet, killing people on the opposite side of the Earth is as simple as pushing the button. Online games, including MMORPG, have provided the means for this for more than a decade. And the popularity of those games has helped created a multi-billion dollar industry where developers work together with marketers to please users by giving increasingly realistic experiences.
And this time, through the metaverse, the world is expecting an every more realistic experience.
But when it comes to people's well-beings and mental health, Omar Sultan Al Olama, the United Arab Emirates' Minister of AI, is worried.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he shared his beliefs that people who commit "serious crimes" in the metaverse should be punished with real-world criminal consequences.
He said that:
"But if I come into the metaverse and it’s a realistic world that we’re talking about in the future and I actually murder you, and you see it […] it actually takes you to a certain extreme where you need to enforce aggressively across the world because everyone agrees that certain things are unacceptable."
In other words, the Minister stated that the realistic nature of any metaverse that emerges may allow individuals to be terrified in ways that aren’t feasible.
This is why Al Olama encouraged the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations’ specialized organization for information and communication technologies, to hold a discussion about establishing international metaverse safety rules that individuals must follow regardless of where they reside. On the internet, for example, there are agreed rules to prohibit drug trafficking and child pornography.
The same goes for "passporting" between one metaverse platform, and another metaverse platform.
The question is, who should be held responsible when this occurrence happens?
Should it be the person behind the virtual avatar? Or the avatar itself? The programmer who made it happen? The company that owns the product? The government? Or the lack of laws that govern the metaverse?
And when someone inside the metaverse committed the "serious crimes," what should he/she do afterwards? What exactly is the distinction between right and wrong? What does justice entail?
For example, one avatar uses a knife to stab another avatar to "death."
In other cases, one avatar can use a gun to shoot another avatar mercilessly in a manner that can cause him/her to experience the horror.
And in another example, one avatar essentially pushed another avatar to fall from a cliff, making the avatar to experience "falling to death."
Inside the metaverse, this can happen.
But in a place where people can only interact through screens or AR/VR devices and their peripherals, there is no way for anyone to literally murder someone else.
But technology does have its own disadvantages in terms of users' well-brings.
From the very beginning, mobile devices that become smarter and more capable have taken more and more of people's time, and slowly turning users into "digital zombies."
The metaverse is just another technology.
While the term has been around for decades, and has been commercialized by many, the concept metaverse is still debatable. It's only after Facebook rebranded to Meta and announced its metaverse that everyone in the tech sphere began to scramble.
Since then, tech companies are already pouring billions of dollars into its development.
The metaverse grabbed headlines across the world, when a beta tester testing Meta's VR platform Horizon Worlds reported that she was virtually "groped."
The incident sparked debate on the definition and jurisdiction of ‘crimes’ that could possibly take place in the metaverse.
"There will probably be something like a rating system, which we have for film, we have for music, we have for other types of content so that a parent or a young person can have some sense of what the rules are in the environment they're going to walk into," said Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer at Meta.
Here, Cox agrees with Al Olama, and remarked that the world should be led by international rules when it comes to the metaverse.
It's easier to deal with exceptionally unpleasant content, like images of child sexual assault. But when considering virtual murders, things become murkier.
Besides virtual murder, how about petty crimes, like shoplifting?
Does something in the metaverse worth something that can be measured in the real world? Or does it needs to be measured via virtual currency? This can also confuse lawmakers because it's difficult to describe "stealing" something that doesn't exist.
This is an argument that surely exceeds the definition of the term in the real world, as metaverse exists ‘virtually’. And because virtual is not real, but can look very real, this can confuse lawmakers.
"If you want free services at scale, advertising is going to be the natural business model for it just like it has since print. If we move those (advertising) models, which rely on making predictions about what you want and suggesting things to you, and in some cases, I think, manipulating your behavior [...] I think it's a terrible risk," said Philip Rosedale, the founder of virtual world platform Second Life.
It's worth noting though, that PTSD can be triggered by a variety of circumstances, and that there is no physiological benchmark by which it appears.
To diagnose PTSD, clinical diagnosis can only be accomplished via observation and conversations with medical professionals.
Read: Metaverse Is 'Dangerous By Design' And Not Suitable For Children, Researcher Found
