Liam_OConnor's Blogs

Pseudonyms, handles, gamer tags, online IDs: call it what you will, what you are likely posting under now is a mask. In most cases, it's fine. People post consistently enough that histories are built and people get a sense of identity. Sure, it's attached to a concept, the idea of a poster -- how very postmodern! -- more than the person behind the screen, but there is still a sense of self.

Plus, you know, it's cool to pick your own name.

However, it also has the ability to be abused. I'm not just talking about being a /b/tard or just making a sock-puppet account to troll someone. Hiding behind the mask of a pseudonym allows people to often say things that they wouldn't say in real life.

Recently, Blizzard introduced its Real ID system to Battle.net. This allows you to talk to people you know in real life across realms and factions. It's really quite amazing. I can talk to my girlfriend while she plays Horde and I play Alliance, or I can talk to friends who live in different countries and play on other servers. It identifies you by your real name, but then these people I am talking to know it already and I have nothing to hide from them.

However, quite amazingly, Blizzard are now implementing the system into their forums. This means that every time you will post, you will be posting with your real name.

The reasoning is understandable. For far too long those forums have allowed people to be utter douchenozzles hiding under the shroud of relative anonymity. Want to troll someone on those forums and don't even have the guts to post under your main character? Create a level 1 alt on some random server and away you go. You can be a d*ck and you don't even need to worry about it affecting your e-peen, let alone your real life.

_{Click to embiggen and see the true evil.}

But now you will always be you. It will always be your name. Trust me, you're a little more careful about what you say when you are posting under your real name. (Part of the reason I ditched my old pseudonym was because I felt like it was taking on a personality and ego of its own and I was a different person when posting under it.) How many homophobic and racist comments would you hear on Xbox Live if people were using their real names?

However, it raises some interesting questions. While for the average white male this will probably be something of an annoying non-event, what about females who have the potential to get stalked by sexless geeks desperate for female (gamer) attention? What about minors under 18? What about people who are transgender or are just experimenting with parts of the personality in a virtual world? What about the possibilities of identity theft? Sure, not all names are unique -- go Google Liam O'Connor, for example -- but there are still a lot of concerns.

Sure, privacy in your town or even city could perhaps be a myth. 2 degrees of separation, after all. But the Internet is a much larger pond than even the largest city.

It's interesting, though, that it's come to this. After all, people on the Internet have demonstrated that they cannot behave in a civil and respectable manner when left anonymous and relatively unrestrained. This is a knee-jerk, for lack of a better word, reaction to it. It's a privilege lost, you might say. But at the same time, it appears to be the way of the Internet more and more. Facebook demands real names and with it being used more and more as a global login in, you can see that privacy wavering. Look on the front page of this very site and see all the people who "like" NZGamer. Indeed, the other day I was "stalking" a few members from the forums.

But with pseudonyms, there is a level of abstraction, and breaking it takes effort. Most people really can't be bothered unless you've done something to provoke them. If you have, was it because you were hiding under a mask?

The question here though is how much does this level of abstraction and the illusion of privacy matter to you? Do you act differently when posting under a pseudonym or playing under a gamer tag? Would you quit engaging in an experience -- like so many WoW players are claiming -- if this privacy was broken?

Most importantly, what would you do about the Wild West that is Web 2.0?