Video game developers including a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing Virtual Reality (VR) games which simulate black people and Muslims suffering discrimination.
Developed by MIT researchers, On the Plane is designed to simulate the supposed horrors of being Muslim while airborne, enabling gamers to “confront prejudice, such as racism and xenophobia, and potentially develop a more inclusive perspective about others.”
“This project is part of our efforts to harness the power of virtual reality and artificial intelligence to address social ills, such as discrimination and xenophobia,” declared Caglar Yildirim, an MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) research scientist.
“Through the exchange between the two passengers, players experience how one passenger’s xenophobia manifests itself and how it affects the other passenger. The simulation engages players in critical reflection and seeks to foster empathy for the passenger who was ‘othered’ due to her outfit being not so ‘prototypical’ of what an American should look like,” he added.
“Experience a Virtual World of Segregation”
Meanwhile, Barnstormers VR is designed to let gamers “experience the triumphs and discrimination of a Negro League-era baseball player,” according to an Axios report.
Designed by Derek Ham, an Associate Professor at North Carolina State’s College of Design, Barnstormers allows people to play simulated Negro League baseball games — and then, perhaps more importantly, “experience a virtual world of segregation and the baseball players try[ing] to navigate it” once the game is over.
“Players talk about their struggles, and users can see poverty and inequality in the urban areas around them,” according to Axios’s description of the experience.
References to potential applications for “educators” in the Axios report will raise concerns among parents already sensitive to the rapid spread of s0-called Critical Race Theory (CRT) through schools and colleges, with it not being difficult to envision a future in which white students are made to take on the role of minorities enduring brutal oppression in a virtual world, to better understand their alleged “privilege”.
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