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Facebook has removed a virtual reality shoot-em-up experience from a tech demo at a top American conservative conference after recieving criticism for being "tone deaf" following last week's deadly school shooting in Florida. The social network has a presence at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) conference in Maryland, this week, including a booth running a demo of its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. This demo included a first-person shooting game.
People on Twitter have criticised Facebook for running this demo so soon after the deadly shooting attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 people dead.
The game, Bullet Train, was just one of a number of standard Oculus games/demos that Facebook has included at public events. In fact, Bullet Train has been around since 2015, and the team that made it released a full game called Robo Recall, funded by Oculus:
The game will be an Oculus exclusive — that company is funding its development — and the five-to-ten-person team that created Bullet Train has ballooned into a full 15 person team at Epic in order to turn this into a real game with a release date in "early 2017." It will include a number of graphical jumps from Bullet Train, and this benefits Epic in other ways as well.
Yet, Facebook still tried to distance itself from the original demo:
The demo for the game, called "Bullet Train," is being developed by a third-party game-maker, not Oculus, the company said.
Why is Facebook at CPAC? Probably as part of an ongoing effort to placate conservatives angry at the platform.
This comes a few months after the Puerto Rico hurricane VR debacle.
Also at The Guardian and The Hill.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @12:49PM (1 child)
The problem is never the availability of an object that can be abused, it's always the abject moral failure of the person misusing the object.
Clearly, video games, dancing, mental illness, foreigners, and city folks are all instruments of the devil that won't want Trump to lay the foundation for the golden path to allow Pence to be president. But once he is, the holy war will need all of the righteous to be well armed, you know. Ajit is just a tool at this point because he happens to be americanized and in a position of power. once his work is done he'll be comfortably discarded and he can do what he likes as long as he isn't in the way.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @05:36PM
I do wonder if such crazies as you pretend to be really exist. Maybe that's why they don't want better gun licensing, they know 90% of themselves or their friends will be denied, and probably 25% thrown right into Looney bins for being radicalized domestic terrorists. That's right, you crazy fucks are two steps away from being hillbilly Isis, and you getting thrown into a deep hole might be worth the police state fuckery we'll have to fight our way out of.