In an initially-cryptic tweet posted December 26, 2015, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey states:
After the initial pandemonium on Twitter, Reddit user “HustonVR” took to the web to find its meaning.
As someone who is, very sadly, old enough to have been there for that watershed moment, let me say, yes the following are highly likely:
- A staggering number of profoundly uniformed people will crash into the community, asking questions which could have been answered with 30 seconds of reasonably skilled web-searching. Some of them will be jerks, or at least will start out that way.
- The same questions will be asked repeatedly, all day, every day. Even polite, expertly crafted responses will be misconstrued, misunderstood, or disbelieved.
- The ratio of signal to noise is going to get much, much worse in all the most publicly visible venues.
But the following things are also true:
- Some of today’s clueless neophytes will eventually mature into amazing people who give back to the community, in content or in thoughtful discussion. I promise.
- As frustrated as we often will be at the challenges some of these new people will bring, we also get to front row seats to witness the transformative effects as VR becomes part of the fabric of society. There will be some joy and pride to be had in seeing and being a part of that transformation.
- Those of us who have been part of the community for a long time have the opportunity and privilege to act as elders in the new, expanded community. If we can muster the grace to weather the noise and the abuse with patience and kindness, we can (to a degree, over the course of time) set the tone of the community, and influence its culture, its priorities, and its direction.
- Despite corporate and regulatory influences, much of the original ethos of the early Internet survives– and it does so thanks to the steadfastness of many of its pioneers, extending well into the era of ubiquitous internet access. (See RFCs and open standards for infrastructure, free flow of information, universal ability for anyone to create and share content or opinions, etc.) Now we get to pick our battles and shape the future of VR.
So archive your best and most well-honed answers to the questions you’ll see a dozen times a day, and treat the clueless with as much patience and kindness as you can muster. It’ll be different, and it will sometimes be exhausting and frustrating. But it will, in the end, be worth the effort.
The current community of VR enthusiasts and developers is a tight-knit group that knows that the consumer launch is imminent, thus bringing on tens of thousands if not millions of new users. As this new user base grows, the more challenging it will be to keep that initial community together.
