Am I Failing My Team? My Students?

There are so many things to love about virtual reality. Knowing that I’m part of building VLG and creating student experiences that change lives used to make me feel empowered and secure. It was like being part of something big and important — something that was making everyone’s lives better.

Real world concerns? I left those to people who wanted to deal with tangible, physical bodies and needs. (Not that I don’t care about those….but I’m passionate about VLG!)

Now, however, the wires have gotten crossed so badly that our online virus is becoming a problem out here in the physical world. Not only am I failing my VLG team and our students….I feel like somehow I’m failing everyone else too. Of course I’m not the only one here….but I can’t help but feel that I should be able to do something to fix this. Or that I should have prevented it from happening in the first place. Should I have seen it coming?

And even though I can feel a deep knot in my stomach, and an ever present sense of dread and panic, there are still idiots saying that this virus doesn’t matter, that it’s just happening inside a game. That “virtual” doesn’t mean anything.

It’s not a new attitude. When you’re a kid, those are the people who tell you that you need to play a real sport, and spend time in the real world. When you’re an adult, they tell you to get a real job, and joke about how nice it must be to play video games for a living.

Usually, I don’t let it bother me. I know what I do is important, and I’m here because I love it. Every time I hear the comments lately, however, I realize that stopping this thing is going to be nearly impossible if no one with the power to do something will choose to take it seriously.

The virus we’re facing isn’t a game.

When we first start hooking people into the VLG, we knew it was big. Medical tracking, VLG immersion, and maximum growth offered more and more ways to tap into a potential that offered so many wonderful benefits. Computer programming was like a window into a beautiful future that we could keep improving forever.

We were seeing people grow like they had never grown before; leaps and bounds ahead of more traditional learning methods. Society was the best it had ever been, as far as we know.

Of course we knew there was also increased vulnerability when we took programming to the next level, and then the next. We were constantly weighing pros and cons. More immersion meant more learning….but it also meant more susceptibility to whatever was happening inside the VLG world. The power and intensity of the experience was meant to transfer learning, but it was becoming very clear that, in addition, it could program other, less desirable things into our students as well, and could also leave them open to attack from other characters who were operating far out of the bounds of anything we had ever dreamt of.

I felt like a doctor who had spent years thinking they were curing cancer….only to find out they were actually causing it. Reading our student reports used to be a highlight of my day, and now seeing them come in makes me sick.

What options do we have?

This virus is playing on polarization and extremism from deep within, where we have little control, but the VLG world itself carries so much good. The governing board is going to be horrified to hear what’s been happening, but I know we have to take it to them, with full transparency, and develop a plan of action if we want to have any hope of saving our students, VLG, and the world.

This virus must be stopped!