Social VR's focus on embodied and immersive experiences has led to intensified and more physicalized forms of harassment than other online contexts. Therefore, a growing body of HCI and CSCW work has explored multiple strategies and mechanisms to prevent and mitigate harassment risks in social VR. However, existing works have also highlighted a fundamental challenge in mitigating harassment in social VR - the apparent lack of consensus among social VR users on how to explicitly define harassment and what behaviors should be considered harassing in social VR. In this work, we aim to offer new knowledge on the uncertainty about how harassment is defined and perceived in social VR, particularly by learning from social VR users who have experienced both sides of harassment accusations . Based on interviews with 12 participants with diverse identities who have both been harassed by others and been accused of harassing others in social VR, we unpack how people justify and reflect on their behavior given their prior experiences of both being victims of harassment and being called a harasser. We thus offer unique insights into the complexity of harassment in social VR by highlighting cases of "gray areas" and critical ethical implications in such harassment accusations, which are understudied in the existing literature. We also propose two high-level design principles for new strategies and approaches to foster safe social VR spaces based on people's unique experiences of both sides of harassment accusations in social VR.

The popularity of social virtual reality (VR) platforms such as VRChat has led to growing concerns about new and more severe forms of online harassment targeting one's identity characteristics (i.e., identity-based harassment ). Social VR users with marginalized identities (e.g., women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and racial/ethnic minorities) have been reported as particularly vulnerable to such harassment. This is mainly because social VR can make one's offline identity known to others (i.e., what we term identity revelation in this work) through a unique combination of avatar design, voice use, and immersive full- or partial-body tracking. To address these safety concerns, there is an urgent need to unpack the complex dynamics surrounding how one's offline identity is (mis)perceived by others, and how these (mis)perceptions may affect identity-based harassment in social VR. This study thus utilizes a large-scale survey with 223 social VR users across six continents/regions of the world with varying social VR experiences and identities to investigate (1) the relationship between identity-based harassment in social VR and (mis)perceptions of selective identity revelation practices, (2) how embodying one's identity in social VR might actually be less risky than once thought, and (3) how who you are does still matter when it comes to identity-based harassment in social VR. It also highlights the need to better account for understudied aspects of identity-based harassment in social VR and to better educate social VR users on the interplay between harassment and (mis)perceived identity revelation in these spaces.

Non-profit driven indie game development represents a growing open and participatory game production model as an alternative to the traditional mainstream gaming industry. However, this community is also facing and coping with tensions and dilemmas brought by its focus on artistic and cultural values over economic benefits. Using 28 interviews with indie game developers with a non-profit agenda across various cultures, we investigate the challenges non-profit driven indie game developers face, which mainly emerge in their personal or collaborative labor and their endeavors to secure sustainable resources and produce quality products. Our investigation extends the current HCI knowledge of the democratization of technology and its impact on the trajectory of innovating, designing, and producing future (gaming) technologies. These insights may help increase the opportunities for and retention of previously underrepresented groups in technology production and inform effective decision/policy making to better support the creativity industry in the future.

Although social support can be a vital component of gender and sexual identity formation, many LGBTQ+ individuals often lack offline social networks for such support. Traditional online technologies also reveal several challenges in providing LGBTQ+ individuals with effective social support. Therefore, social VR, as a unique online space for immersive and embodied experiences, is becoming popular within LGBTQ+ communities for supportive online interactions. Drawing on 29 LGBTQ+ social VR users’ experiences, we investigate the types of social support LGBTQ+ users have experienced through social VR and how they leverage unique social VR features to experience such support. We provide one of the first empirical evidence of how social VR innovates traditional online support mechanisms to empower LGBTQ+ individuals but leads to new safety and equality concerns. We also propose important principles for rethinking social VR design to provide all users, rather than just the privileged few, with supportive experiences.

Extensive HCI research has investigated how to prevent and mitigate harassment in virtual spaces, particularly by leveraging human-based and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based moderation. However, social Virtual Reality (VR) constitutes a novel social space that faces both intensified harassment challenges and a lack of consensus on how moderation should be approached to address such harassment. Drawing on 39 interviews with social VR users with diverse backgrounds, we investigate the perceived opportunities and limitations for leveraging AI-based moderation to address emergent harassment in social VR, and how future AI moderators can be designed to enhance such opportunities and address limitations. We provide the first empirical investigation into re-envisioning AI’s new roles in innovating content moderation approaches to better combat harassment in social VR. We also highlight important principles for designing future AI-based moderation incorporating user-human-AI collaboration to achieve safer and more nuanced online spaces.

Online harassment against women - particularly in gaming and virtual worlds contexts - remains a salient and pervasive issue, and arguably reflects the systems of offline structural oppression to control women's bodies and rights in today's world. Harassment in social Virtual Reality (VR) is also a growing new frontier of research in HCI and CSCW, particularly focusing on marginalized users such as women. Based on interviews with 31 women users of social VR, our findings present women's experiences of harassment risks in social VR as compared to harassment targeting women in pre-existing, on-screen online gaming and virtual worlds, along with strategies women employ to manage harassment in social VR with varying degrees of success. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on harassment in social VR by highlighting how women's marginalization online and offline impact their perceptions of and strategies to mitigate harassment in this unique space. It also provides a critical reflection on women's mitigation strategies and proposes important implications to rethink social VR design to better prevent harassment against women and other marginalized communities in the future metaverse.

As social Virtual Reality (VR) grows in prevalence, new possibilities for embodied and immersive social interaction emerge, including varied forms of interpersonal harm. Yet, challenges remain regarding defining, identifying, and mitigating said harm in social VR. In this paper, we take an alternative approach to understanding and designing solutions for interpersonal harm in social VR through the lens of consent, which circumvents the lack of consensus and social norms on what should be defined as harm in social VR and reflects the embodied, immersive, and offline-world-like nature of harm in social VR. Through interviews with 39 social VR users, we offer one of the first empirical explorations on how social VR users understand consent as "boundaries," (re)purpose existing social VR features for practicing consent as "boundary setting," and envision the design of future consent mechanics in social VR to balance protection and interaction expectations to mitigate interpersonal harm as "boundary violations" in social VR. This work makes significant contributions to CSCW and HCI research by (1) uncovering how social VR users craft novel conceptualizations of consent as boundaries and harm as unwanted boundary violations, and (2) providing three foundational principles for designing future consent mechanics in social VR informed by actual social VR users.

Computer-mediated collaboration has long been a core research interest in CSCW and HCI. As online social spaces continue to evolve towards more immersive and higher fidelity experiences, more research is still needed to investigate how emerging novel technology may foster and support new and more nuanced forms and experiences of collaboration in virtual environments. Using 30 interviews, this paper focuses on what people may collaborate on and how they collaborate in social Virtual Reality (VR). We broaden current studies on computer-mediated collaboration by highlighting the importance of embodiment for co-presence and communication, replicating offline collaborative activities, and supporting the seamless interplay of work, play, and mundane experiences in everyday lives for experiencing and conceptualizing collaboration in emerging virtual environments. We also propose potential design implications that could further support everyday collaborative activities in social VR