It’s the best kind of double standard.
After the news that Facebook bought Oculus VR, and the backlash against both Facebook and Oculus afterwards, it has been reported that some of the employees of Oculus have had death threats sent to them.
It appears that some gamers cannot tell the difference between a company and the people that work for the company.
That’s ridiculous. A teenager working at McDonalds is not responsible for obesity; neither are the families of the Oculus workers responsible for the businesses decisions.
This is obvious, but the threats still happen.
There are many reasons for this. On the internet it is much easier for your voice to be one of a crowd; there is the issue with anonymity, and discussions about what is and what isn’t freedom of speech. But these all lead into one bigger conclusion:
We cannot tell the difference between businesses and people now.
A Note On Corporate Personhood
Corporate Personhood is the legal concept that a corporation may be recognized as an individual in the eyes of the law. The basis for allowing this rather odd legality is that people (shareholders, employees and such) should not lose aspects of their human rights when acting as the company they work for. This has led to corportations claiming more and more ‘personal’ liberties (such as the ability to lie); and when a company is being perceived less like a job and more like a person, then criticism of [insert games company] quicking becomes [insert criticism of everyone working for games company] even if we don’t realise it. Take Minecraft:
We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.
— Markus Persson (@notch) March 25, 2014
For most people, @notch is Minecraft. The company is embodied by one person. But while in the game industry, gamers are (usually) familiar with a few of the developers behind their favourite game, this is not the case for, say, large supermarkets. Who is the CEO of Tesco right now? Exactly. You don’t know, I don’t know, we don’t care.
Social Media has mades this Phenomenon Easier
Social media is a great way to make us care; the ‘character’ of a business is created by committee to be the most pleasing to the greatest number of people – the best kind of person. Our ‘Waldo Moment’ is now. When you see a tweet like this:
Sorry Monday, we just can’t handle you today. We’re going to shine a coffee-cup-shaped signal into the sky and await rescue.
— Tesco (@Tesco) March 31, 2014
big businesses need social media, it blocks employees from consumer criticism
It is actively going out to present the company as human. Social media acts as a mask, but they’re the faces of Janus – corporation face on one side, human face on the other. That’s why big businesses need social media, it blocks employees from consumer criticism.
But this is Xeno’s Paradox: take a company of 100,000 people, remove one employee. Is it a small company yet? No? Ok, we’ll do it again, now there are 99,998 people? Small? Not yet…but do that enough times, and there’s no boundary between a big company and a small one.
How small can a business be before criticism stops attacking the business, and starts directly attacking the people?
In the game industry, which is full of smaller developers – often representing their work through their personal social media accounts – gamers have to ask where the boundary is betwen criticising the games or company and criticising the people.
The late, great Oscar Wilde once remarked that
“There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all.”
This translates well to all media. Ezra Pound was a fascist; Orson Scott Card is a homophobe; typing “Phil Fish is” into Google autocompletes with “douche,” “prick,” or “jerk.” But they still have made great work, and criticism of the work should be separated from criticism of the people.
We might not like what is being said. But we should defend to the death their right to say it.
