This article explores the Oculus suite of virtual reality (VR) technologies, with a specific focus on the period following the company’s 2014 acquisition by Facebook. Through a close reading of promotional material, we first describe and analyse the ‘Oculus imaginary’ – the narrative produced by Facebook about the Oculus as integrated into and enhancing the experience of Facebook’s wider suite of social software. The purpose of this narrative, we suggest, is to construct and ‘sell’ a Facebook-specific vision of VR’s potentials – one that is appealing both to end users and platform complementors – and moreover, a vision that appears to be conducive to Facebook’s current methods for accumulating profit and power. Following on, we develop via a study of YouTube user comments posted on promotional videos for the Oculus, an anticipatory account of how the Oculus imaginary is perceived to relate to the lives and values of everyday individuals.

Virtual Reality (VR) represents an emerging class of spatial computing technology reliant upon the capture and processing of data about the user (such as their body and its interface with the hardware), or their surrounding environment. Much like digital media more generally, there are growing concerns of who stands to benefit from VR as a data-intensive form of technology, and where its potential data-borne harms may lie. Drawing from critical data studies, we examine the case of Facebook's Oculus VR-a market leading VR technology, central to their metaverse ambitions. Through this case, we argue that VR as a data-intensive device is not one of unalloyed benefit, but one fraught with power inequity-one that has the potential to exacerbate wealth inequity, institute algorithmic bias, and bring about new forms of digital exclusion. We contend that policy to date has had limited engagement with VR, and that regulatory intervention will be needed as VR becomes more widely adopted in society.Issue 4

Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology with the potential to extract significantly more data about learners and the learning process. In this article, we present an analysis of how VR education technology companies frame, use and analyse this data. We found both an expansion and acceleration of what data are being collected about learners and how these data are being mobilised in potentially discriminatory and problematic ways. Beyond providing evidence for how VR represents an intensification of the datafication of education, we discuss three interrelated critical issues that are specific to VR: the fantasy that VR data is ‘perfect’, the datafication of soft-skills training, and the commercialisation and commodification of VR data. In the context of the issues identified, we caution the unregulated and uncritical application of learning analytics to the data that are collected from VR training.

This essay develops the concept of “quantified play” to describe and analyze the recent practice of self-tracking in the play of videogames. I argue that statistical, self-tracking utilities in videogames shape how gameplay “appears” and how it is experienced and valued by users. I proceed by situating contemporary self-tracking in games as part of a broader history of play as “quantified.” From there, drawing on interdisciplinary studies of self-tracking, as well as Bernard Stiegler’s postphenomenological analyses of technology, I characterize quantified play in three main ways. First, it is voluntary and occupied with self-knowledge. Second, it is used in mundane or everyday contexts. Third, it relates to the habitual faculty of users. The remainder of the essay illustrates the concept of quantified play through two examples of tracking hardware and software—showing how numerical or statistical apprehensions of player activity (and visualizations thereof) shape how we negotiate videogames.

This article analyses how broadcasts of electronic sport (e-sport) condition the gameplay practices of those who watch. Extending and deepening a limited body of past work, I conduct this analysis through a post-phenomenological perspective, adopting Bernard Stiegler’s theory of technicity. Stiegler provides a useful theorisation of how technical forms carry significant implications for the human, whose status is always already technical. As Stiegler sees it, adopting new advancements or changes in technical forms conditions human experience and behaviour profoundly. Mobilising this post-phenomenological view, I examine how players, through the prism of broadcast e-sport, negotiate the temporal, corporeal and technical aspects of their own gameplay. To do this, I draw upon findings from a wider research project about e-sports broadcasts in Valve Corporation’s popular game Dota 2, showing how various complicated and sometimes antagonistic entanglements emerge from the assemblage of e-sports broadcasts and the gameplay of its viewers.