Right: User-made agit-prop poster for the Helldivers 2 protest
Pretty interesting Polygon story on the successful user community-led uprising against Sony's policy changes to Helldivers 2. The multiplayer game is reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven's version of Starship Troopers, satirizing war movies heavy on propaganda while also succeeding as an enjoyable war movie in its own right.
In the case of Helldivers 2, the protest consciously echoed the rousing military rhetoric from the game:
On Friday, Sony announced that Helldivers 2 players would need to link their in-game accounts to their Sony accounts, requiring a log-in to an additional platform... The PlayStation Network is not accessible in 177 countries and territories, and so players from regions like the Philippines completely lost access to a game they had already paid for.
Helldivers 2 players immediately moved into action, coordinating on platforms like Reddit, X, and Discord to make their displeasure clear. Helldivers 2 was hit with hundreds of thousands of negative Steam reviews, turning its very positive ranking upside down. Players made memes and propaganda posters, rallying under the slogan “We dive together, or we don’t dive.”
... Sure enough, Sony caved on Sunday night, announcing that the game would no longer require account linking.
Thankfully, the protesters are also calling to delete their negative reviews, which can be a death sentence for a game's longevity.
At any rate, I love how the community leveraged the game's own themes and rhetoric to rally for their cause. It reminds of the famed Tax Revolt rebellion in Second Life, where the user community involved with creating Americana, an SL tribute site to US landmarks.
So to protest a company-imposed "tax" on building, the community covered Americana in giant tea crates:
Above: Protest leader "Fleabite Beach"
From Making of Second Life:
At launch, SLers paid a monthly fee (much like traditional MMOs) and were given a weekly stipend of Linden Dollars, an allotment of land, and a set number of objects they could create on their homestead. Create more prims than that reserve, and Linden automatically deducted a bloc of L$ from their account—in effect, a “tax” on excessive building. As with other social engineering mechanisms mentioned previously, the tax system was conceived with the best intentions—penalizing too much building would curb server lag, and place a Darwinian punishment on low quality content.
Instead, it led to beautifully catastrophic results.
... What ultimately drove [protest leader] Fleabite and his cadre was the belief that Linden Lab had failed to keep the vision it promised: with the tax system, it was not a place of freeform creativity, but a world where stringent limits were set on that creativity. Worse still, it conflicted with the company’s rhetoric of an improvisational, collaborative, community-minded world. (Then again, isn’t that what usually catalyzes social upheaval: an irresoluble clash between a society’s stated values, and society as it actually is?)
Seen one way, this was great viral publicity. Seen from another angle, it was now widely known Linden Lab was selling subscriptions to a service with offerings that were so flawed, they were causing open revolt with muskets and arson.
As with any real world protest, don't be surprised when a virtual world community holds the controlling organization's own rhetoric and branding to a high standard -- even against it!
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