Browsing by Subject "Collective action"

This master’s thesis examines comments for and against virtual reality (VR) as a gaming technology in the context of the VR-only game Half-Life: Alyx. Comments were collected from its online community in the Steam discussion forum, and understood as speech acts. The game is the first in its series to not be playable with a keyboard and mouse. The purpose is to examine the virtual community’s speech acts in connection to social movement mechanisms for taking collective action: social networks, collective identities, conflict action against identified others. This mixed-methods case study’s primary method is qualitative grounded theory. For comparison, additional data was also collected on whether the commenters purchased the game or not. The research material consists of comments before and after it was released. Commenters are grouped based on their comment sentiment toward VR as positive, negative, neutral (mixed), or unclear. These sentiment groups are visualized as social networks. In results, Half-Life is modernistically constructed as a technology-advancing gaming series. The advancement in its latest release Half-Life: Alyx is contributed to its use of VR technology. The game being playable VR-only divides the virtual community’s reception of the game, and the technology. Disagreements concern the technology’s economic expenses, gaming experiences, and distinctiveness as a gaming medium. The shared collective identity of “the Half-Life community” is a PC gaming community, which consists of “Half-Life fans” who consider themselves to be keyboard-mouse gamers, and gamers who are part of a “VR community.” They use different conflict strategies against the identified other. In time, the commenters became less polarized. Furthermore, they entertained which of the mediums or what future technology will be used in Half-Life 3. In essence, the main phenomenon of the gamer divisions around Half-Life games’ hardware requirements but later uniting as a community is named “The Half-Life cycle,” although not all commenters agree that VR belongs in the same technology-advancing narrative as the previous technologies. The hardware and software developer Valve is discussed in regards to the company benefiting from the divided Half-Life community, whether or not a “divide and conquer” strategy was intended. Furthermore, the main phenomenon Half-Life cycle is discussed from multiple perspectives. Further research suggestions relate to the distinctions between virtual communities and social movements, what a technological movement would look like, and the understanding that different communities can be divided similarly to social movements.