To Make A Real Omelette, You Need To Break A Few Anonymous Eggs
It’s now been approximately 40 hours since Blizzard Entertainment announced their intention to deploy their RealID feature on the internet forums of all their forthcoming game franchises.
A quick summary: RealID is a feature that was recently introduced to accompany the long-awaited ‘Battle.net 2.0’, and allows players to create friend lists based on their specific Battle.net accounts, rather than game-specific handles, so that they can keep in touch across multiple games with ease.
It’s a convenient feature, and one that people could leave alone if they weren’t interested.
The trouble is, Blizzard then turned around and decided to deploy this feature on their forums. This attaches a person’s Battle.net account to their forum posts, and displays their real names instead of an alias on any forum post they make. The same name that’s on their driver’s license, birth certificate, insurance cards, and so forth.
This unto itself isn’t the issue. The problem is that this display of their names is being made mandatory – if you post on the forum, your name is displayed. And since these will be publicly accessible forums, this means those names are now there for the entire internet to see.
Let me relate to you briefly the tale of Julien Barreaux. A young French man who was playing the online shooter Counterstrike, and was angered when his online character was killed by another player with a knife strike. So Julien spent seven months tracking the other player down, traveled to his home, and tried to kill him with a knife strike – that missed his heart by an inch.
He had managed to track him down and attack him with nothing but an online game alias to start with. Blizzard’s new forum feature is going to give anyone who needs anger management a full name.
As an example of the implications: a Blizzard employee posted his first and last names on their forum to prove a point. In a matter of a few hours, some industrious people with free time and Google had taken this name and returned with his home address, phone number, and the specific office where he worked.
They’re now enabling this to be done to anyone, and apparently they expected people not to have a problem with it. I think it can be summarized thusly:
Blizzard, are you out of your $&!#ing gourds?
On the North American World of Warcraft forum alone there is a discussion on the subject that has reached 40,000 posts – over 2,200 pages. A few computer savvy members had simple programs parse the thread for unique posters, to get a better figure of the actual number, and came up with a ratio of 2.5 posts per person.
This means that, from a single group among the shyest, least likely to speak out, most easy-going people on the continent – in less than two days – 16,000 people have voiced their opinion. And though I’m less familiar with their figures, similar discussions are present and number in the thousands of posts on all the language-specific European forums as well.
The response is unmistakably negative.
And given the typical predilection of the gamer community to simply stay silent entirely, the number of silent votes against this new policy could potentially be in the hundreds of thousands.
It was said, some time ago, on those very same forums, that the only thing that would ever manage to bring down World of Warcraft was Blizzard itself – and evidently they’ve decided to make a go of it.
Alexander Kean, Editor of the Awesome Press, is a university student studying Applied Linguistics with a focus on the ways different cultures approach issues, and wonders how any board of directors could be #!*$ing dumb enough to ever think mandatory real names on the internet was a good idea.
