RealID pt.3; Penny Arcade Chimes In; Internet Dragons.
Just so you all know, I don’t work from home, nor do I have a cushy office job where I pretend to work while instead scanning forums and e-stalking hapless WoW players. This week just so happens to be my vacation (or stay-cation, to be more accurate), and while I fully intended on getting some serious gaming in all week (I have a giant backlog of xbox 360 games, not to mention some great new games from Steam’s crazy summer sale), ActiBlizzard’s release of the RealID plans kind of, well, threw that for a loop. On the upside, I got a cool flash in the pan out of it; let’s see how many of you stick around next week (SPOILER ALERT: I’ll still post, but probably not every day). Don’t worry, I won’t take it personally if you don’t – it’s the internet!
So first and foremost, a list of a few RealID-related updates:
I’m sure you’re all familiar with John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. If not, it is as follows:
Now I’m sure a lot of you have noticed that many of the supporters of the RealID system (so far every one that I’ve found is white and male, but that could just be coincidence) have been referencing the above Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory as proof/reason for their support. “Remove the anonymity, and the troll will go away!” they say. Now, Tim Buckley over at Ctrl+Alt+Del is of the mind that if you take away the anonymity, not a goddamned thing changes, and I agree. People who are gonna troll are gonna troll no matter what.
More to my amusement, however, Tycho posts his take on the RealID/Real Names issue:
If I thought I could top this comment over at MetaFilter, I would do so. I can’t. The RealID thing is a bad idea that won’t work. If it were merely a bad idea, or merely wouldn’t work, maybe there’d be something in it. Accountability is crucial – you might recall our theory on the subject – and a fixed persona makes the laws of a microculture enforceable. But the idea that this persona must bear your actual name to lend it value (for you, or for others) is ludicrous.
The worst part about the official messaging is how it conflates expanded Battle.Net functionality with RealID, so that it seems as though these things are inseparable, as though your mystically-infused “truename” is a bundle of syllables congealed with a cosmic power. They chose to commingle these things in order to realize Battle.Net as a Social Network, and to develop true cultural currency (also: regular currency) thereby.
What do you get out of it? Well, that depends.
So please – stop posting the Fuckwad Theory as your basis. Accountability is important, yes, but a single username for a RealID would accomplish the same thing.
SpiderFarmer makes one of many fantastic posts from a female gamer’s standpoint, and I commend her for her post. Also deserving of praise for the same topic are all the folks over in the WoW Ladies community who decided to step up and speak their minds – not to mention this incredible master list of information and links. Well done!
A great many popular gaming bloggers continue to leave the game in protest (or at least cancel their subscriptions for the time being), while many helpful forum posters state they will cease to post altogether outside of their blogs. Keeva at Tree Bark Jacket suggests allowing a wow.com-esque self-regulation downranking system, and I gotta say that’d be pretty awesome. The sad thing is, the more and more I read about this, the more I’m convinced that it has nothing at all to do with forum behavior or trolls, as the initial post said, but instead has to do with the aforementioned facebook integration, a desire to secure ActiBlizzard’s Asian market by complying with Korean and Chinese laws, and/or the eventual implementation of targeted advertising in game. That is not a road upon which I’d like to travel, sad to say.
Anyone have any suggestions of upcoming MMOs that look promising? Champions? Warhammer? FFXIV? That Torchlight MMO? Ascended is open to suggestions, should this change go live. I know many will still play (and I support their decision to do so – I just want them to be happy), but a large amount of my guild has already canceled their subscriptions, and one of the most important things for us all, in the end, is that we play together. We still have members on our forums that quit playing years ago, and I have no intention nor desire to see the community of my guild collapse because of RealID. Any and all suggestions, however, are most appreciated. We just want to kill internet dragons.
Finally, I’d also like to add that I am extremely excited about this possibly becoming the new Hitler Downfall meme:
Video editors – FALL IN AND ROLL OUT!
