[Air-L] Blizzard Forums will soon display real name

Mia Consalvo consalvo at ohio.edu
Thu Jul 8 15:00:00 PDT 2010


I haven't read the WoW forums much, since I only played the game briefly,
but the tone of the forums always surprised me for its viciousness (which
also was problematic in terms of racism, homophobia and sexism being
present)- I was a longtime reader of the forums for Final Fantasy 11, where
things seemed much more civil. I don't know if it was the game, the type of
player attracted, or even perhaps the fact that FF11's forums were *not*
official-- Square had no such official ones, so players started them
elsewhere (I read the ones on Allakhazam). I wonder if enough players are
upset, if there would be greater movement towards 'independent' forums like
that.

Mia

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 5:31 PM, live <human.factor.one at gmail.com> wrote:

> Love what you stated here.
> Very similar to what Bonnie Nardi of UC Irvine stated in a new blog post:
>
> http://umichpress.typepad.com/university_of_michigan_pr/2010/07/bonnie-nardi-is-author-of-my-life-as-a-night-elf-priest-a-new-book-on-the-culture-and-gameplay-in-the-international-bestsell.html
>
>
> On Jul 8, 2010, at 8:31 AM, David Jones wrote:
>
>  I've grown more and more concerned about the power of companies like
>> Facebook or Blizzard to dictate what constitutes "identitity" and how
>> people
>> manage their online personas. Mark Zuckerberg has used the rhetoric of
>> "openness" and "integrity" to push Facebook's default stance of making
>> their
>> participants' data public. There are all sorts of scary questions about a
>> company like Facebook deciding it has the right -- even the ethical
>> obligation -- to determine what constitutes an online identity.
>>
>
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-- 
Mia Consalvo, Ph.D.
Visiting Associate Professor
Comparative Media Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Building  14N-226
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
USA
consalvo at mit.edu
617.324.1868



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