[Air-L] Research Ethics: Ethnography of Virtual World in Social Virtual Reality

[Hu2,R (pgr)]

Dear all,

Happy new year! My name is Runze. I'm a second-year PhD candidate from the Department of Media and Communications at London School of Economics. I am writing this email with the hope of gaining feedback and possibly initiating a discussion about the research ethics in social Virtual Reality (VR) studies. By social VR, I mean the emerging phenomenon that people use VR headset to socialise with people in immersive virtual environments. The AoIR community has produced three ethical guidelines which I found really helpful, but for social VR, I feel uncertain about many challenging ethical and methodological questions. Therefore, I am writing to seek help from the collective wisdom of the AoIR. I hope these ideas could be useful for people who are interested in studies of social VR
I am about to conduct a multi-sited ethnography to study the participation in social VR in the Chinese context, and the chosen platform is VRChat https://vrchat.com/. This multi-sited ethnography will start from the VRChat platform and follow several recruited players across multiple online and offline sites relevant to the VRChat culture.


  1.  Filming in VR, Informed Consents and Confidentiality

VRChat is constituted by numerous interlinked immersive virtual environments which could be public or private (with password protection). What usually happens in a virtual environment is players tend to form several gatherings in different locations on the map.   One of my research questions is about how the affordances of social VR and users' daily interaction give rise to the norms and rules of participation (Erving Goffman's 'situational proprieties').
This requires me to be a participant observer of these daily interaction. However, one challenge unique to the social VR context is that, with the VR headset on, jotting is impossible. My solution is that my avatar will hold a virtual camera (visible to all participants) to capture my experiences. Filming in public space has always been an ethically complex issue both because the rich information it captures and the difficulties of gaining informed consents from all filmed individuals. To minimise potential harm, the footage will be converted to fieldnotes immediately after each session. All participants will be de-identified, and the original footage will be deleted. The terms of service of VRChat does allow filming. I also found that the negotiation of filming practices are common scenarios among VRChat players.

I aim to gain informed consents from all key participants but not everyone involved. I plan to use 4 different strategies to tackle 4 distinctive scenarios.


  1.  For participants who travel across the scene without direct interaction with the researcher, informed consents will not be pursued. Chasing these people would be impractical and disruptive to their normal activities. The fieldnote will only describe the general patterns of the crowd with no intention of describing individual avatar and its IDs. The information collected could be considered as low-risk.
  2.  When approaching individuals or a group of participants, I will start by introducing my identity as a researcher and why I am here. When one or more participants refuse to be studied, I will immediately stop filming. The conversation will not be included in the fieldnote. Most importantly, due to the likely expected privacy in each gathering,  in no circumstances will the researcher eavesdrop or covertly observe others' behaviours for an extended period without notifying them.
  3.  For participants who allow the researcher's participation and observation, consents will be negotiated verbally. In line with AoIR's three ethical guidelines, this is largely a dialogical process that will evaluate the potential harm and informed consent on a stage-by-stage and case-by-case basis. Asking for written consents may not be appropriate. Social VR usually does not have a file transfer system. Asking for written consents means I need to obtain other ways of contact, which will be considered intrusive for people who do not want to develop relationships beyond the platform.
  4.  After establishing a deeper relationship with specific participants, and when other messaging channels are established, written consents will be signed as a more secure record that indicates the participants are informed.

I wonder if there are any ethically problematic practices I have not noticed, especially regarding filming in virtual semi-public space.


  1.  Harassment in Social VR and Illegal Activities

One important aspect of the research is to understand how the user community define and self-regulate the improper behaviours such as hateful speech, harassment, violations of personal space etc. One thing I realise when playing social VR and reading relevant literature is that users' definition of 'improper' and 'harassment' is highly context-specific and personal.
I wonder whether the researcher should have a more active role and to directly intervene when encountering such scenarios because the heightened sense of embodiment and presence may cause more harm than in other online contexts. My approach is that I would not directly intervene unless my informants clearly show signs of being offended or offend others. I will advise players to open their safety system if they appear to be helpless and do not know any countermeasures. VRChat has a built-in Safety and Trust system which could be used to shield certain social cues in VRChat. Users could also completely block untrusted users (blocked users will disappear).
For activities against the Chinese law I may encounter on the platform (though the chances are slim), I will choose to ignore the majority of them (I will only report them when it is extremely serious).  Platforms like VRChat occupies a legally precarious position in China. Chinese users' access to this type of software is protected by WTO agreement as long as it does not violate other Chinese law. VRChat is currently not under government censorship or intervention from the Great Firewall. Exposing illegal activities (including cult, terrorism, secession, subversion, endangering national unity etc.) may trigger a ban and jeopardise other users' access to the platform in mainland China. But I may choose to report prohibited activities to the platform when it violates the VRChat community guideline. Therefore, my research is more about the cultural politics of everyday meaning-making rather than activities usually defined as activism in the western contexts. This may not be seen as a limitation of the research but a conscious choice of theoretical framework.

Thank you for reading this lengthy description and I will appreciate any constructive comments and suggestions about research ethics in social VR. I also hope these ideas could be useful for people who are interested in researching in social VR.

All the best,

Runze Hu
PhD Researcher
Department of Media and Communications
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)