The Stage and the Theatre: AltspaceVR and its Relationship to Discord

Abstract

Immersive virtual reality (VR) has seen growth in usage over the last few years and that growth is expected to accelerate. Correspondingly, many VR-based online communities have begun to emerge, and several social VR applications such as AltspaceVR have gained significant popularity. However, virtual reality can be isolating. Users can meet and connect with people in VR, but inevitably, when a user removes their headset, their friends are no longer there. In this paper, we look at how communities in AltspaceVR, a popular social VR application, handle this challenge. We conduct fourteen interviews and over 70 hours of participant observation and find that AltspaceVR users and communities have turned to Discord to solve many of their needs, such as facilitating more ubiquitous communication, planning community activities and AltspaceVR Events, and hosting casual social discussion. By using the communicative ecology model for our analysis, we find that AltspaceVR, Discord, and the communities that intersect the two have formed a tightly-coupled communicative ecology, which we call the "stage" and "theater". Discord acts as the "theater," where actors and crew collaborate and communicate to prepare for the main event, all the while building important social bonds. AltspaceVR acts as the "stage," where those efforts manifest in ephemeral but high-value experiences that bring the community together. Finally, we compare the communities we studied with those found in massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and provide insights regarding the design of social VR applications and online communities.