There's a huge community blow-up going on in Reddit's /Vive, the hangout for enthusiasts and early developers of Valve's highly anticipated VR platform produced with Taiwanese handset giant HTC. Very briefly summarized, someone from HTC was made part of the /Vive moderator team, and accusations of influence-peddling and corporate control soon followed. This again reflects yet more growing pains as virtual reality tries to go from a hobbyist technology to a mainstream consumer product, with early adopters likely to resist the transition, or outright jump ship to the competing platform seen as most pro-developer and non-corporate.
Oculus VR, as you may remember, got the same kind of hate from that community when it sold to (or sold out to) Facebook. But in that case, Palmer Luckey, a heavy Redditor, was able to directly address the outrage and entirely tamp it down. With Vive, a product of Valve, I'm not sure that's as possible:
Valve CEO Gabe Newell has tremendous influence among technologists and gamers, but he's not as directly involved with Vive in the same way Palmer is, and may not be able to tamp down a mutiny as easily. Stay tuned.
Please share this post:
This anti-corporate or, at least, resistance to capitalistic framing of the gaming community seems to flare up in places like gamergate and other places that there is a transition from hobbyist to mainstream media production. I wonder if this is part cultural from hacker culture and the open access movements, which is part of a broader libertarian drive of tech culture, as it resists dominant narratives of state/corporate control. In Chris Kelty's (another anthropologist, works at UCLA) opening narrative of his book on the open access, corporate control of software makes for problematic releases and does not fill the drive to create a better product for users. I suggest that here, with HTC "becoming" a "part" of the discussion of Vive, users feel threatened that a hardware company is going to release a flawed project, this then "hurts" the chances for hobbyist control over a product. So essentially we are arguing about control over what community is better for gaming culture. This then can be seen in Gamergate and other kerfuffles in the gaming community.
Posted by: Steven Losco | Thursday, September 17, 2015 at 02:29 PM
Engineered outrage in a gamers' forum on Reddit? Inconceivable!
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Friday, September 18, 2015 at 04:18 AM
Yup, them snitch-happy Reddit trolls are a snooty, snitty, snotty bunch who HATE marketing and despise self-promotion. Their lil' uprisings have run more than one company clean off of Reddit for nooby interactions there. Simply, put: have a hourly wage peon police your sub! Some nameless, faceless meatspace bot!
Posted by: Jumpman Lane | Saturday, September 19, 2015 at 07:27 PM