Or to put it another way it desensitizes people to violence.
It can. And if you're the victim of violence, that may be desirable.
Likewise, if you have a fear of spiders bad enough that it interferes with your quality of life, you likely want to be desensitized to spiders.
VR therapy for fear of spiders made the news [1] a few years ago, so it's quite possible there's been more (professional?) progress in the field.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/16/technology/fearless-vr-spid...
I wonder how far that could go. If you had people play as spiders could you get people to actually sympathize with spiders?
If it were part of a designed and controlled therapeutic program maybe.
But a regular and 'by design' aspect of a game, presumably online?
Dunno if I, as an arachnophobe who plays plenty of games online-trust griefers not to ....well grief with that kind of power, heh.
Well, I was thinking something like a single-player game where you are the spider and, through the course of whatever the gameplay entails, you struggle as a spider to stay alive. This could perhaps build empathy for spiders and cause people to think twice before casually killing one. So beyond conquering arachnophobia, what if we can give people a positive affinity towards spiders?
A multi-player spider game sounds potentially terrifying.
Kidding aside, it does seem like VR probably has value as a kind of exposure therapy..