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

David Jones djone111 at odu.edu
Thu Jul 8 08:31:33 PDT 2010


I can't help but wonder how much this move is tied to Blizzard's recent
announcement that they are going to integrate Battle.net 2.0 with Facebook.
My understanding is that the integration begins later this month with the
beta testing for Starcraft 2. I have not found or read anything concerning
the details of the deal that Blizzard and Facebook struck, but it would seem
to me that a couple of things are apparent if these two services come
together.

1) Facebook, by default, makes their participants' data public. If part of
the idea is to integrate Friends Lists and social networks across both
platforms, making Battle.net IDs public would seem to be a major part of
such a move.

2) Facebook would most likely want access to Battle.net participants' data
in order to monetize it, as they do with their own participants.

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.

For Blizzard, this seems to be expecially tricky considering their social
networks are predicated upon fantasy spaces, like WoW or Starcraft. Part of
the gaming experience is character creation, which includes a substantial
amount of fiction that operates within the cultural contexts that attend
fantasy role-playing. Thus, identities are an admixture of "the real" with
fiction, and it is often impossible to really discern where the player ends
and the avatar begins. Or, in many cases, some players feel their online
avatars are better representations of themselves than anything they could
muster in the brick and mortar world. Aspects of the fantasy role-play allow
for identity exploration, and online spaces have always been far more
accomodating of this kind of exploration.

I doubt Blizzard will see major repercussions financially from this move,
but I also doubt they understand some of the damage they might inflict upon
their communities. What's worse, I'm increasingly afraid they may not care
because any loss in paid subscriptions might be more than offset by
potentially monetizing Battle.net participants' data -- which I highly
suspect will happen, at least eventually.

-- 
Dave Jones
PhD Student
Professional Writing and New Media
Old Dominion University
Vice Chair, SIGDOC ODU
djone111 at odu.edu



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