Team
Wilson Chen
Tan Gemicioglu
Jon Womack
Tan Gemicioglu
Jon Womack
My Role
Qualitative Researcher;
focused on content moderation and queer/creator communities
focused on content moderation and queer/creator communities
Methods
Ethnography
Secondary research
Participant observation
Semi-structured interviews
Secondary research
Participant observation
Semi-structured interviews
SCOPE
2/1/2022 - 3/29/2022
Research project
~50 combined hours of participation
Research project
~50 combined hours of participation
Disclosure: This was an independent STUDY and was NOT sponsored BY or done in collaboration with Meta.
The Motivation
The recent rebranding of Facebook into Meta revived design discussions about the integration of VR/XR in our lives.
VR is a novel and niche medium for social interactions - these aspects lead to many interesting unsolved problems in interaction, moderation, and community design.
Initial preparation
Before committing to the case study, we surveyed the existing literature on online communities, virtual reality, and competitors like VRChat and Rec Room.
This research gave us a more focused grounding, and helped us find the right questions to ask going into our participant observation.
Research Questions
We arrived at the following three questions to guide our research:
1. How well does Horizon Worlds conform to Ray Oldenburg's theory of a "third place"?
2. How are issues of moderation and harassment resolved in a VR community?
3. How does Horizon World's creator community work?
Some of the papers we scouted out that we believed would be relevant to our research topic.
Ethical Considerations
Our study first went through an IRB approval process due to the sensitivity involved with studying people outside a controlled environment.
To ensure we were conducting our research ethically, we disclosed ourselves as researchers, did not engage with minors, and held ourselves to strict standards of transparency when interacting with others. For privacy, interactions were not recorded.
Interview participants signed a consent form prior to initiation of an interview session. Interviewers were given anonymity by default, with an opt-out only if they specifically requested otherwise.
CONDUCTING THE RESEARCH
Participant Observation
Our team immersed ourselves as active participants in the Horizon Worlds community, disclosing ourselves as researchers and spending ~50 hours collectively between the months of February and March.
Each researcher spent time on the platform independently, interacting in spaces that aligned with our own interests to produce a more diverse scope.
After each session, we recorded field notes with interesting observations about our experiences.
The majority of my time was split between a weekly queer meetup and content creator community events.
Semi-Structured Interviews
We recruited 8 interview participants through purposeful sampling, using our best judgment to select a diverse group of users who would provide a high degree of insight toward the community.
I recruited three of these 8 participants. Two of them were high-profile content creators holding weekly community events, and one was an independent creator using the in-game world editing tools to create assets.
We recorded these interviews and manually transcribed them, taking care to anonymize names and mentions of names unless otherwise given permission by our interview subjects.
Key Insights
Horizon Worlds as a third place.
While not prototypical, we argue that Horizon Worlds does contain the characteristics that make it a third place.
Using Oldenburg's criteria, we found that Horizon Worlds is a neutral ground, is a leveler, conversation is the main activity, is accessible (insofar as one owns a VR headset), contains regulars, is debatably low-profile, has a playful mood, and is somewhat a home away from home.
That said, individual worlds within the platform will vary in terms of the prototypicality of these eight characteristics, giving each space an opportunity to be a third place with varying degrees of prototypicality.
Quotes
"People just... I mean, people like to chat, and that's the nature of it."
"Like if you want to build worlds, you want to learn how to build a world. You build with other people. That's the best way."
"[What I'm] cautious and afraid for is the desktop and mobile apps that are speculatively being worked on. The potential to have somebody coming in who doesn't feel the presence that we feel scares the heck out of me."
Horizon Worlds and Moderation
We found that Horizon Worlds does not enable community-level moderation and does not follow a responsive regulatory pyramid.
Instead, these problems are attempted to be solved at the platform-level through protective features and world-level by individual creators’ scripted solutions.
Quotes
"You can't do what some of these other platforms are doing. [Meta] can't make the risky choices. They have to, like put up a four foot bubble around us because some one person got assaulted and is now making a big stink on news platforms.”
“It's now a game because you bounce off of people.”
"[I was] in a smaller session where half the session was just kids and it was supposed to be an education session I was teaching [...] these kids were using the bubble to push me around [...] And so I was like, OK, let's go and poll to remove them. But because they were there together they were able to stop the poll to remove and basically ruined the session.”
"We made a stick that you can now click with your index trigger and [the trolls are] gone. And I was like, Yep, that's better."
Horizon Worlds and Content Creation
The concept of a community of practice was coined by Lave and Wenger (1991) as a group that engages in a shared interest and gains an increasing level of competency through regular interaction with community members.
We argue that Horizon Worlds’ creator community can be understood through the perspective of a community of practice. World building is the primary activity, and creation is learned through doing and through observing the work of others. Horizons' built-in level editor is an integral part of this community.
Quotes
“There's worlds that some of us have built on our own, and they're OK or they're good. But these worlds that we've collaborated on are just phenomenal, and it shows by the traction that it gets."
"My philosophy is that like if I can figure it out today, what's stopping me from like developing more techniques eventually?"
"Well, right now I am still spending a couple hours on it every day at least, and I do like to try and see if I can make some videos or blog about it and try to be a... is it called influencer?"
Reflection
This was my first digital ethnography, and conducting it in VR was definitely a dive into deep water. It was extremely reward to see the quality of insights we gathered from interviewing community members, and this process gave me tremendous appreciation for the value of interviews in research.
Although this was UX-adjacent work done while I was still doing computer science, I think there's great value here in the implications for designing digital experiences in VR. Many of the insights we discovered could be transferrable to other VR communities and provide avenues for further research - what do platforms like VRChat and AltspaceVR do differently, and how does that affect the type of user that becomes a platform regular?
