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Abstract

This paper presents a case study of the inaugural year of Launch Pad, a diversity initiative by Meta’s virtual reality (VR) subsidiary, originally known as Oculus. As industry-led discourse presented VR as a vision of opportunity and change in the tech industry, Launch Pad presented a vision of social progress through improved diversity. However, a variety of contextualizing factors within that first year complicate these visions of progress, including the gendered and racialized norms of the tech industry, the politics of Oculus’s co-founder and the mixed feelings of the first beneficiaries of the program. I argue that even if Launch Pad is a good faith effort to address historical and current forms of marginalization and underrepresentation in the tech industry, such efforts must go much further than mentorship and tokenized inclusion, requiring a genuine recognition of the need for systemic change.

Keywords

Diversity Facebook games gender inclusion Meta Oculus race virtual reality VR

Introduction

Virtual reality (VR) entered the consumer market in 2016 with the promise that it would offer progressive change in the technology sector. Diversity initiatives at Oculus VR¹ – a VR company owned by Meta – began the same year that consumer VR headsets were released, marketed under the banner of ‘VR for Good’. That year also saw the beginning of Oculus Launch Pad, which continues to be marketed as a funded, annual ‘boot camp’ for ‘content creators of diverse backgrounds’ (Oculus, 2022a). The language that Oculus uses to promote ‘good’ VR has remained relatively consistent, with current company advertising still proclaiming: ‘There’s nothing virtual about the difference we can make’ (Oculus, 2022c). According to Meta, VR offers a ‘way to make the world a better place’ (Meta, 2019).

Recent academic work has provided a counterbalance to these claims, suggesting that the allure of VR and its promotional discourse belies a repetition of problematic social, cultural, and technological norms that discourage or oppose progressive change (Evans, 2018; Golding, 2019; Harley, 2020, 2022; Irom, 2018). Through the lens of prior work, it is perhaps unsurprising that an initiative like Launch Pad might only offer tokenized inclusion, providing limited participation in the future of VR as promised by tech corporations. While Launch Pad ostensibly provides tangible opportunities for funding, mentorship, and a possible audience for creative work, it bears a resemblance to other initiatives that ‘celebrate’ racialized and marginalized identities for the sake of diversity without substantive changes in hiring or work culture (e.g. Bryant, 2016). As Lisa Nakamura (2020) argues, even though contemporary VR is ‘packaged as above all a “good” technology’ (p. 48), its production relies on structures and systems that perpetuate racism, sexism and other forms of oppression.

Because the possible ‘good’ of a program like Launch Pad is enmeshed in these complications, and because its beginning coincided with the release of consumer VR, an examination of its first year provides an opportunity to identify some of the interconnected factors that hamper and delimit opportunities for change. After outlining the context for this work and my methodology, I draw on Collins’s (2019) ‘domains of power’ heuristic to present a case study (Yin, 2014) of Launch Pad’s inaugural year. The analysis begins by arguing that Launch Pad’s promise of diversity is an appropriation, not only of content and experiences but also of workers into a system that does not actually support them. I then turn to examples of the sexist realities of participating in the VR sector at the time, suggesting that from the outset there was an engrained culture of exclusion. Given that Collins’s heuristic is also a tool to better understand and document resistance, in the final section I show that for Launch Pad this included public statements by inaugural members, offering an important counternarrative to the hype and expectation that was pervasive in the first year of consumer VR.

Context: The many domains of VR

The study of contemporary VR is perhaps better understood as an amalgamation and/or extension of examinations of other industries and domains. The false promise of ‘good’ virtual reality (VR), particularly as it relates to gendered, racialized and colonialist content, builds on prior work on documentaries (Nash, 2018; Rose, 2018), games (Harley, 2020), film (Golding, 2019), humanitarian media (Irom, 2018) and cultural studies (Nakamura, 2020). In each case, VR adds unique facets and new considerations, even as the debates and concerns of VR intersect with known challenges across other fields and other media. For example, while sexual and racial harassment across social media is an ongoing problem (Vickery and Everbach, 2018), social VR applications add (among other things) new forms of physical harassment in online spaces (Blackwell et al., 2019). These extensions of VR are also entangled with the corporations that stand to gain from increased adoption: amid an effort to integrate VR into their social media ecosystem, Meta is also increasing their data tracking capabilities (Carter and Egliston, 2021; Egliston and Carter, 2020, 2021, 2022).

Looking across the many domains of VR signals an opportunity to examine how VR affects, extends or modifies a range of social, cultural, and technological practices. In the case of Oculus Launch Pad, prior work in other fields might predict that creative workers in the VR industry are likely to encounter labour precarity and underrepresentation across intersecting identity markers like race and gender (Bulut, 2015; De Peuter, 2011; Gill, 2014; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Harvey, 2019; Whitson et al., 2021). These possible repetitions begin to offer a baseline for analysis. Phan et al. (2022) might call an initiative like Launch Pad yet another example of ‘virtue capital’, in which Big Tech buys and sells perceived ethical conduct to capitalize on positive optics while downplaying more pervasive negative actions. Similarly, Hoffmann (2021) argues that the rhetoric of inclusion in the tech industry can be understood as a form of ‘discursive violence’, presented as a solution to known ethical problems and controversies without explicitly challenging the systems that uphold discrimination and inequity.

Meta’s broader efforts to improve diversity could be used as an example of how notions of diversity and inclusion are leveraged: their annual ‘diversity report’ is a showcase of slowly improving representation without any clear expectation of systemic change. It shows that despite modest improvements in representation, leadership positions at Meta have been dominantly held by white men since Meta began their diversity reports in 2014 (Meta, 2021). According to the report, only 35.5% of leadership roles are held by women, and a total of 4.7% of leadership roles are held by Black people. Despite these meagre gains over time, the same page that reports these statistics also uses this (lack of) ‘diversity’ as a recruiting strategy: ‘Interested in working with a diverse team to build products that impact the world?’ (Meta, 2021). If statistics like these already represent ‘diversity’, any efforts for wider structural change can be deemed unnecessary by the institution (Ahmed, 2017). Launch Pad does very little to tangibly move these numbers, but examining how and why it continues to attract and provide some funding and support to approximately 100 creators per year offers a glimpse at how the inherited challenges and problematic repetitions in the VR industry are interpreted and opposed.

Methodology

Asking questions about the social and political contexts of VR is an opportunity to draw attention to what Judy Wajcman (2004) refers to as ‘systematic absences’: ‘[w]omen’s systematic absence from the sites of observable conflict over the direction of technological developments is … as indicative of the mobilisation of gender interests as is the presence of other actors’ (p. 149). Working from an intersectional feminist perspective (Collins, 2015, 2019; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) that understands ‘race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age [as] reciprocally constructing phenomena’ (Collins, 2015: p. 3) situated within existing power structures, the same can be said for other marginalized identities, whose systematic absence from VR production and design can be understood as the mobilization of exclusion. As such, the goal of this case study is to better understand distributions of power by examining and contextualizing a diversity initiative that coincided with the release of major consumer VR headsets, asking: What does the first year of Launch Pad reveal about power and diversity in the first year of consumer VR? To answer this question, I focus on two key sources: 1) public and industry discourse from 2016 that situates consumer VR within real-world contexts and 2) public accounts and statements from members of the inaugural year of Launch Pad.

While the majority of the data presented here was collected as part of a larger study, this paper focuses on a smaller subset (approximately 30 sources) to provide a close reading of how Oculus presented Launch Pad, while also extending the analysis by incorporating contextualizing data from that time that includes Launch Pad members’ blogs, news articles, and corporate statements. This range of data is consistent with case study research that strives to account for the blurred lines between case and context (Yin, 2014), and has been important in recent VR research to better integrate discourse that is spread across a variety of media sources (Carter and Egliston, 2021; Foxman, 2018; Harley, 2020). Through iterative cycles of hand-coding, I grouped data into three areas: first, the vision of Launch Pad as presented by the company; second, a selection of contextual, contemporary factors that provided a contrast to Launch Pad’s aspirational discourse; and third, accounts from members of the inaugural year of Launch Pad to document and understand their frustrations. Taken together, these areas of interest begin to trace a ‘matrix of domination’ – what Collins (2019) also refers to as interconnected ‘domains of power’, a heuristic to articulate how power is unevenly distributed, enacted, and resisted across structural, disciplinary, cultural and interpersonal domains. While I do not claim that this is a formalized approach to applying this heuristic, drawing attention to power across these areas of focus shows that as the VR industry repeated known problems identified in other technological and creative sectors, Launch Pad members also helped to publicly bring attention to those problems, articulating a need for broader, more systemic change.

‘Good’ beginnings: The promise of diversity the first year of consumer VR

In 2016, a blog post celebrating the beginning of the Oculus ‘VR for Good’ initiatives opened with a bold claim: ‘Virtual reality has unlimited potential for gaming and entertainment, but it’s also a powerful way to drive important social change’ (Oculus, 2016b: para. 1). Today, the text on the Web site for ‘VR for Good’ extends these claims: ‘We have the potential to transform education, improve productivity, advance social movements, and expand our understanding of people and cultures around the world—all through the power of virtual reality’ (Oculus, 2022c). Statements like these about the ‘unlimited potential’ and ‘power of virtual reality’ undergird expectations about the medium in the first year of consumer VR. As such, the statements are extensions of the ‘discursive newness’ of VR (Harley, 2022) within a public-facing ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ as articulated by Meta (Egliston and Carter, 2020). In this section, I narrow the focus of this public-facing imaginary to Launch Pad within the cultural and disciplinary domains of power, as outlined by Collins (2019) – that is, this section is about the vision that Launch Pad presents as a social institution, examining how its associated and/or expected practices and actions might challenge or reinforce the status quo in the tech sector.

Launch Pad began in 2016, presented as a one-day ‘boot camp’ followed by a 3-month ‘Live Developer Training’ for ‘creators from diverse backgrounds’ (Oculus, 2022a). The Web site, which still includes some of the original text from the 2016 announcement (Oculus, 2016c), states, ‘We hope to inspire developers that represent our global audience to share their voices with the world. By investing in developers with unique perspectives, we can bring more exciting content to VR fans everywhere’ (Oculus, 2022a: para. 5). The statement appears to conflate ‘diversity’ with ‘unique perspectives’, and does not comment on the causes or conditions that might have led to a lack of diversity, let alone its broader effects. Oculus (2022a) writes, ‘This includes women, people of colour, members of the LGBTQ community, and anyone who is willing to share how their perspective adds to the “diversity of thought” in our community’ (para. 5). The quotation marks around ‘diversity of thought’ are not explained, but the rhetoric stresses that it is the ‘unique ideas’ of underrepresented developers that will help build a ‘global audience’. The notion that those with ‘unique perspectives’ must then ‘share’ those perspectives by participating in a market as defined by Oculus suggests a commodification of experience: ultimately the corporation judges the degree and type of ‘diversity’ necessary to ‘build’ audiences.

While the notion of ‘diversity of thought’ will return in a subsequent section, here it adds uncertainty to how diversity might be conceptualized for prospective Launch Pad members. Today, the judging criteria for the application lists three factors: diversity at 35%, technical ability at 35%, and innovation at 30% (Oculus, 2022a). The official rules (Oculus, 2022b) offer slightly more information: ‘Diversity: Representative of diversity of thought in the virtual reality industry (e.g. Application/Content represents out of the box thinking) (35%)’ (section 6). Again, the emphasis on ‘diversity of thought’ is notable for the absence of a celebration of differences in identity, but here it is further complicated by value placed on ‘out of the box thinking’; this seems closer to the one-line description for innovation, which calls for ‘an ability to push the boundaries of virtual reality’ (section 6). A post on the Oculus VR forum shows how the innovation category was once ‘passion’, though scored slightly differently: ‘Passion for VR (35%); Represents diversity of thought in the industry (35%); and Technical Experience (30%)’ (Oculus, 2016d). Even if ‘diversity of thought’ were defined to accommodate and understand compounding oppressions across identity markers (see Collins, 2015), at the cultural level, the other criteria valued by Oculus begin to establish foundations for disciplinary action, whereby success for Launch Pad members could depend on adopting and reinforcing expected understandings of technicity and innovation.

Over 100 people were selected in 2016 to participate as Launch Pad members, with about 10% (11 people) going on to receive more significant funding for their projects ($250,000 USD divided between the 11 scholarship winners) (Oculus, 2016a). The rules for the scholarship in 2016 show that by that stage of the process, ‘diversity’ (however it might be conceptualized) was no longer part of the judging criteria, with the new categories being ‘Promise: Extent to which the concept for the VR software will, if executed well, appeal to the greater Oculus community (50%); and Innovation: Extent to which the game, experience, or video’s design and execution demonstrates originality (50%)’, specifying that a higher score in ‘innovation’ would break a tie (Oculus, 2016e). Because there is nothing especially clear about any of the terms, whether passion, or innovation, or diversity, there is also no language to support or encourage anything that might be deemed counter-hegemonic. As Benjamin (2019) writes, ‘Too often, “inclusion” is limited to the visible representation of people of colour and presumes that those who have been excluded want to be part of a tech future envisioned by others’. By the time of the more significant financial contribution from Oculus, the work was judged based on ‘appeal’ and ‘originality’ as understood by the existing community.

Yet it is also understandable that participation, whatever the limitations, might be seen as an exciting opportunity. For Shamir Allibhai, who participated in the inaugural year of Launch Pad and who would go on to become one of the 11 scholarship winners, the promise of Launch Pad was similar to the promise of VR more generally – it was a chance to shape the industry at its beginning. He wrote, ‘Imagine you could help build an entire industry from scratch: how would you do it so that it becomes diverse?’ (2016: para. 1) He describes his fellow members as ‘diverse in age, ethnicity, and gender—a change from the typical Silicon Valley gathering’ (para 2). This linking of hopes for the industry and hopes for diversity shows one of the ways that Oculus’s language can be interpreted: for some members it was about concrete change in relation to what was otherwise ‘typical’ in the tech sector. Allibhai concludes with a call to action that suggests that his interpretation of diversity was encouraged:

One of the most memorable moments of the event came from Anna Sweet, Head of Developer Relations at Oculus. She said typically an industry will become successful and then we will try to fix it. With VR, she said, we are at the early stages and we have the opportunity from the outset to build a foundation with diversity baked into its DNA. (para. 13)

For Allibhai, the initiative was seen as capable of affecting the broader VR industry. As with notions of diversity, notions of ‘good’ VR have become a recruitment tool: the careers page on Facebook used some verbatim text from the Oculus VR for Good page, adding, ‘Want to make an impact? Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) at Facebook is hiring’ (Meta, 2019). In the first year of Launch Pad, the promise of change was seductive; it was an ‘opportunity’ to ‘build’ something new.

For Oculus, the ability to acquire new talent and new stories through scholarships and training – rather than direct employment – offers a relatively low-cost co-optation of labour, echoing previous work focusing on the games industry, including expectations of extended unpaid work hours (Consalvo, 2008), unacknowledged affective labour (Harvey and Shepherd, 2017), and the appropriation of the work of marginalized individuals and communities by companies under the banner of ‘diversity’ (Harvey, 2014; Ruberg, 2019). In his examination of ‘early adopters’ of VR, Foxman (2018) draws on Duffy’s (2015, 2017) notion of ‘aspirational labour’ to note the ways that his interviewees were drawn to VR, willing to devote countless hours of unpaid time in service of growing the VR industry. Here it is coupled with improving diversity in the tech sector, a desire to participate in work that might ‘drive important social change’ (Oculus, 2016b: para. 1), despite an apparent removal of identity and intersecting oppressions from their understanding of diversity. Further, any emphasis on a ‘passion for VR’ capitalizes on a genuine eagerness to participate in creative and technological development by leveraging that labour under the banner of Oculus. Ultimately, when the commodification of ‘diverse backgrounds’ in VR is hidden behind rhetoric of inclusion and change, it represents an expression of control – a consumerist drive to appropriate and market the labour of those who are not adequately represented by the industry, claiming that it represents ‘diversity of thought’.

‘Overlooking the obvious’: The exclusionary realities of virtual and physical spaces

Even when Launch Pad began in 2016, its claim that ‘VR is for everyone’ (Oculus, 2022: para. 5) was solidly aspirational. The same year that consumer VR headsets were released, contemporary critiques already noted that ‘virtual reality has a sexual harassment problem’ (Ehrenkranz, 2016a). Such examples begin to outline the interplay between the cultural and interpersonal domains (Collins, 2015), revealing some of the negative aspects of participating in the VR community. Within that first year, online outlets covering games and other media would include a critique of a Japanese game in which players can grope female characters despite their ‘non-consensual body language and verbal denial’ (Ehrenkranz, 2016b: para. 3); a story about a developer at the Game Developers Conference who sexually harassed a woman in VR in the name of non-consensual ‘research’, and who concluded that it was ‘way, way, way worse’ in VR compared to non-VR games (Frank, 2016; Sampat, 2016); and Jordan Belamire’s (2016) account of being ‘virtually groped’ by another player who heard her voice in a multiplayer game.

Responses to such moments reveal something of how the culture of VR managed its internal notions of inclusivity. Only a few days after Belamire’s account, the developers of the game wrote a cogent, apologetic response (Jackson and Schenker, 2016), describing how they had improved their ‘personal bubble’ mechanic so that it was more visible, easier to use, and so that it covered the entire body. Previously, it had only protected the player’s face. The developers asked, ‘How could we have overlooked something so obvious?’ (para. 5) They do not suggest that it was something that they missed, quite simply, because their team, or their community, neglected to include women and other underrepresented groups in the production or testing of the work. The developers quickly released the code to their improved ‘personal bubble’ to the developer community. By then, however, Belamire had been the target of misogynist discrediting and victim blaming (Ehrenkranz, 2016c), which has been common to those who have experienced sexual harassment since before the phrase became part of legal and popular discourse (Backhouse, 2012).

Just as prior scholarship and advocacy across other domains might have predicted sexual harassment, discrimination, and exclusion within virtual spaces, the same can be said for the promise of ‘inclusion’ in physical spaces. One visible example was a company called UploadVR, under the leadership of Will Mason and Taylor Freeman. Both would eventually be named in a sexual harassment lawsuit (Matney, 2017). Although Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus, would later be connected to the company by reportedly providing $2.5M USD to keep them afloat (Matney, 2018), a more direct connection is that, like Launch Pad, the company announced its incubator for VR companies in early 2016, similarly leveraging an emphasis on the ‘social good’: ‘we will be placing an emphasis on companies who are looking to use VR and AR for a social good – companies focused on changing lives with education, communication, and groundbreaking empathetic content’ (Mason, 2016: para. 4). Participation in the Upload Collective, as it was known, included an expectation of ‘one hour a week of pro-bono work for the greater good’ (para. 5). A year later, Mason and Freeman would first be celebrated in the Forbes ‘30 under 30’ list (Inverso et al., 2017), and then face a lawsuit that alleged that they ‘purposefully and expressly created a “boy’s club” environment at work, focused on sex and degrading women, including female employees’ (quoted in Matney, 2017: para. 7).

One of the women who initiated the lawsuit would describe how she left one Silicon Valley office because of sexual harassment only to face sexual harassment at UploadVR (Brooks et al., 2017). The suit was later settled (Matney and Shieber, 2017; Streitfeld, 2017).² After the settlement, an apology signed by Mason and Freeman included the following statement: ‘Our primary focus at Upload is education, which we believe is the key to growing the mixed reality ecosystem. We are deeply committed to creating an inclusive community to empower the pioneers building the future’ (quoted in (O’Brien, 2017: para. 5). Here, again, is the notion of inclusion and the possibility to be part of this ‘community’, but only if ‘we’ choose to be among its young, white ‘pioneers’ (see also, Harley, 2022 for an examination of this kind of colonialist language in VR discourse).

This rhetoric of ‘building’ a future for social good overlooks the unequal realities of work environments across the games industry and technology industry more broadly. In an article published the same year as the release of consumer VR, Shana Bryant (2016) describes how being the only Black woman working as a game developer made her feel both hypervisible and underestimated; though racism and sexism was sometimes explicit, it was more often implicit, causing ‘a constant layer of mental, emotional, and even physical stress’ (p. 139), which would affect performance. Describing how she grappled with the exploitative objectification of being asked to appear in a ‘diversity’ video for her company, Bryant writes that there was never an option to simply make games like her white, male co-workers. Seeking change within the industry made her exploitation ‘necessary’ – diversity became her responsibility, and her sense of inclusion was assumed.

Years later, when Bryant was hired by Meta she was asked to speak about ‘her role and how she supports and amplifies women developers, Black creators and other marginalized voices – and why diverse representation leads to better products and more inclusive experiences for all’ (Oculus VR, 2022: para 2). Reflecting on her 20 years of industry experience, Bryant’s remarks suggest that little has changed since her 2016 article: ‘I can say I have worked with thousands of men, a few dozen women, and still only five Black women, one of whom was my twin sister!’ (para. 11). Although her response to the preceding question, about the challenges that women in VR face, is the longest of all her answers, it ends on a seemingly positive note: working in VR is a ‘wonderful opportunity … to shirk the old stereotypes, bust some myths, and correct inequities’ (para. 10). Throughout the interview, alongside her calls to improve representation, improve the tech pipeline, and hire more diverse teams, even the positive note of opportunity contains a reminder of the ongoing working conditions in the tech sector. Those who are recruited to work with ‘emerging’ technologies like VR must also expect to challenge and correct stereotypes, myths, and inequities.

‘Diversity of thought’: The structures of power and change

In the years leading up to the release of consumer VR, Palmer Luckey was often presented as the idealized male user of VR (Golding, 2019; Harley, 2020), an ambassador and evangelist for this ‘new’ medium. By 2016, the revelations that he had funded pro-Trump alt-right groups reportedly shocked the VR developer community as well as members of Launch Pad (Bernstein, 2016; Gibbs, 2016). The revelations also helped to bring attention to the broader power dynamics of the industry, revealing some of the structural power at play as well as important moments of resistance. In an article for The Guardian, Mahdawi (2016) draws a parallel between Luckey and Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and Meta board member who gave $1.25 million USD to Trump’s campaign amid sexual assault allegations. Mahdawi writes that Zuckerberg defended Thiel’s participation on the board by calling it important ‘diversity’—diversity of thought. In an internal Facebook post, Zuckerberg reportedly wrote, ‘Our community will be stronger for all our differences –– not only in areas like race and gender, but also in areas like political ideology and religion’ (see Newton, 2016). As Mahdawi (2016) argues, this problematic interpretation of diversity reveals a misunderstanding of power: ‘Zuckerberg’s reframing of diversity is worrying sophistry. Everyone is entitled to their viewpoint, of course. But most people don’t have the resources, power and influence that the likes of Thiel and Luckey do’ (para. 31).

While it is not out of the ordinary that billionaires like Zuckerberg or Thiel should make statements that appear disingenuous or out of touch, the revelations about Luckey’s political inclinations prompted disillusionment within a space that was said to offer change. Speaking to Buzzfeed News, Launch Pad members reportedly described conflicted feelings: ‘The mood is surprise, shock, dismay, and disappointment… a number of people are creating documentaries to address social issues, and they are questioning whether Oculus is the right platform’ (Bernstein, 2016: para. 3). In their closed Facebook group, another reportedly wrote, ‘Let me get this straight, the founder of Oculus thinks my sister should be banned from visiting me in the US because she’s Muslim? And hates my husband because he’s Jewish?’ (para. 6). Another member, Alejandro Quan-Madrid, who was creating a Day of the Dead project, told BuzzFeed News, ‘How can I promote that when the head of Oculus is giving money [to support] Trump—and Trump wants people in my community deported?’ (para. 7). When Launch Pad members sought a response from Amy Thole, the Diversity Lead at Oculus, they learned that it was – apparently coincidentally – her last week at the company. Two weeks later at the Oculus conference, as if to appease the negative sentiment, the new head of diversity, Ebony Peay Ramirez, would announce an additional $10 million in funding for diversity programs (Graft, 2016), which amounts to 4% of the additional $250 million in overall VR funding that Facebook would announce at the same conference (Fermoso, 2016).

Whether the funding was a direct response to Luckey’s actions is unclear, but the timing made the comparison inevitable. Writing for Polygon after the announcement, Christopher Grant (2016) concluded that the ‘$10 million grant is a great start to convincing people Luckey’s values don’t align with the company’s’ (para. 13). In interviews with Mahdawi (2016), Launch Pad members revealed that despite the funding, the company’s values were now in question. One member, Jeris JC Miller, argued that Luckey’s actions normalize the sexism and racism of the tech sector, which is already embedded within problematic work cultures: ‘It’s really challenging to live and create in a bro-grammer [sic] culture. It’s hard. There’s an ethos and an ethic and a style of relating that in many cases is quite painful for women and minorities’ (para. 26). Whereas Luckey previously represented the promise of VR, he now represented the misaligned power of the industry.

In a blog post about his experiences as a member of Launch Pad, Dale Henry (2017) addressed Luckey directly when describing his dissatisfaction:

In my opinion, your actions, as reflected with the inaugural cohort, were those of an opportunist. Down for the glamour shot PR that black, brown, gay, trans, and females give you, but unwilling to put your money where your mouth is. Even when you have the money. We’re not talking scarcity of resources here at Oculus/Facebook. We’re talking diversity as a low priority, and a lack of motivation because you can’t see the money shot. (Henry, 2017: para. 19)

For Henry (2017), the funding was disingenuous, a media stunt to promote diversity while spending large sums of money on conservative causes, not recognizing the value of diversity beyond its publicity. Henry’s point about diversity in terms of resources allocated is important: as he suggests it is a clear indication of priority. For Henry, Launch Pad became an example of diversity as corporate branding and advertising with no expectation of structural change. There was no acknowledgement of the broader problems that this diversity was attempting to address.

Another member, A. M. Darke (2017), also directed their comments to Luckey, reflecting on a visit Luckey paid to members of Launch Pad, which at the time was seen as a generous use of his time:

I asked you point-blank about diversity at Oculus.

I was immediately disappointed by your defensive response. First, you told me you didn’t know those numbers offhand. When I pressed, you told me you do not lower your standards — that you hire the best. That struck me as disturbing, that you equate diversity with lowered standards. That hiring the best and being diverse were mutually exclusive. I felt a little defeated, to be honest. (Darke, 2017: paras. 5–6)

Darke, like Henry, was frustrated by how Oculus, represented by Luckey, implicitly saw diversity: as charity, with an emphasis on ‘hiring the best’ without addressing the discrimination that equity-deserving groups face within the industry. Along these lines, Launch Pad offered a semblance of diversity without requiring the money or the action to ensure that the initiative was more than a marketing ploy; ‘the best’ in the industry were framed as those who can already adhere to the standards and status quo established by the tech sector.

Henry’s (2017) account of a diversity luncheon at Oculus demonstrated not only his dissatisfaction with the company’s diversity efforts, but also his frustration that these efforts were not known to the rest of the company:

Imagine my surprise at the fact that the two Oculus employees who were sitting at my table had no idea what the Launchpad program was. I mean, they had no idea. To be fair, I’m positive they weren’t the only employees in the room to be in the dark. Even though these employees were at a luncheon specifically for diversity. I’m not blaming the employees. This just tells me that management didn’t do their job to let the company employees know that this program existed. (Henry, 2017, original italics and bolding, para. 15)

What this internal lack of knowledge about the program shows is that although one of the purposes of the initiatives may have been to showcase and support diverse voices, there was no expectation that these efforts would have any effect on the employees, the company’s hiring practices, or its management. The existence of the program was deemed enough. As bell hooks (2013) argues, diversity efforts that do not work to overturn the systems and power structures that create inequitable relationships can only bring a ‘veneer of diversity’:

Diversity could not and cannot have meaningful transformative significance in any world where white supremacy remains the underlying foundation of thought and practice. A huge majority of unenlightened white folks believe that the mere presence of “difference” will change the tenor of institutions. And while no one can deny the positive power of diverse representation, representation alone is simply not enough to create a climate supportive of sustained diversity. Even though racial and ethnic integration brings a veneer of diversity, racism remains the norm. (p. 27–28)

Conclusion

Although Launch Pad in its inaugural year is not necessarily indicative of Launch Pad today, and it is not necessarily emblematic of other diversity initiatives, the debates and tensions between ‘symbolic’ and ‘real change’ in the tech industry (e.g. Paul, 2020) remain pressing issues. One limitation of this case study is that it does not include an account of the positive experiences at Launch Pad. These are more difficult to find, especially outside Oculus promotional media. There was also reportedly an effort to improve the initiative in response to Dale Henry’s (and others’) criticism (Bye, 2017). Future work could develop a better account of what impact the program had on those who received mentorship and funding and to amplify the work of those involved. For example, for Women’s History Month in 2020, Oculus released a set of interviews under the banner, ‘Celebrating Women in VR’ (Oculus, 2020), and includes the question, ‘Where have you encountered support and advocacy for women and other underrepresented groups in the VR industry?’ (para. 14). In her interview, Maria Mishurenko, who participated in Launch Pad 2017 and 2018, as well as the Oculus Start program, responds to this question by speaking to the work of the women leading these programs: ‘I can say that the women who oversee these programs are amazing, dedicated professionals and role models, who gave me hope, support, and lots of inspiration!’ (para. 15) And yet positive accounts do not diminish the need for systemic change – such efforts need to have a direct bearing on the company as a whole and address the ways that power is unfairly distributed and experienced across interpersonal, structural, disciplinary and cultural domains.

Drawing on Collins’s domains of power heuristic, the three themes that organize the findings of this case study are necessarily interrelated: a promise of diversity that mobilizes particular forms of labour, the exclusionary realities of participating in these spaces and the broader power dynamics that show who and what is ultimately valued. Each of these problems precedes and exists beyond consumer VR. These are known problems, not only from past scholarship across other fields, but also from the many accounts of those who work within these spaces and deserve amplification, recognition, and greater equity. The contextualizing data of this case study shows that public commentary of Launch Pad members included vocal critiques of what they observed and experienced. While there is little to indicate that Oculus intended to challenge the social structure that they inherited, there continues to be a need to amplify the interventions and resistance of those who saw VR as an opportunity to create lasting change.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Daniel Harley

Notes

References

Ahmed

(2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham, London: Duke University Press.

Allibhai

(2016, June 8). Building diversity into VR from the outset. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@ShamirAllibhai/building-diversity-into-vr-from-the-outset-dc20f4c97dc7

Backhouse

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The promise of beginnings: Unpacking ‘diversity’ at Oculus VR

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Context: The many domains of VR

Methodology

‘Good’ beginnings: The promise of diversity the first year of consumer VR

‘Overlooking the obvious’: The exclusionary realities of virtual and physical spaces

‘Diversity of thought’: The structures of power and change

Conclusion

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Notes

References