Blame the Cat

I have a confession. I game and I don’t play just any games. I play World of Warcraft, but I don’t just casually play, I raid. I dedicate a portion of each week to cooperatively kill vicious pixels with 24 other people. I admittedly don’t do the killing. I’m a healer and I am, in fact, our raid’s healing lead. I virtually manage a team of 5 – 6 other people to keep the raid alive. I’m also pretty good at it.

People who know me well already know that I play. It inevitably comes up since it’s actually how I met my husband. “Hi, my name is Tammy and I met my husband in an MMORPG.” I started playing a few years ago and I enjoy it immensely. I find it rewarding, in the virtual and accomplishment sense, and I’ve obviously formed some solid and lasting relationships through the experience.

Gaming and World of Warcraft (WoW) in particular have a bad rap with a lot of folks. The games and the people are stereotyped and misunderstood to the point that some employers may decide to not hire someone based on the simple fact that the individual plays WoW. I’ve generally been cautious about how and when I discuss my hobby as the misinformation is rampant (until today, I suppose, but this is my blog so I’m allowed some leeway).

So during the day, I’m a mild mannered employee of a health insurance company who specializes in all things social and internet-y. At night, I’m an extremely tall, lavender goat from space. Don’t judge me. Most of the time, I spend my days educating people about and evangelizing social tools, including the privacy implications. I am deeply invested in my work and I’m a firm believer that social technologies will continue to change how we live our lives. Given that I spent seven years of my life getting a doctorate in Clinical Psychology, it’s fair to assume that I pay attention to such things. It’s also safe to assume that since I work in healthcare and with social media, I am very sensitive to how personal information is managed.

I am extremely protective of my personal information. I am one of the relatively small percentage of people who took full advantage of Facebook’s privacy features. I care about who sees my information and how they see it. I want to have as much control over my information as possible. Only within the past year have I begun using my full name online as it is part of my professional identity.

A month ago, Blizzard (the WoW folks) introduced Real ID. The system allows players to communicate across all of Blizzard’s gaming universes by implementing a single “real” user ID for each player. The system was presented as opt-in and was seemingly designed to connect the users’s real life identities similar to Facebook. The move streamlined player communications and allowed friendships to expand beyond a single game.

This week, Blizzard announced their intention to implement Real ID in the World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo forums. Soon, commenters will be able to post only using their full first and last names as part of the Real ID system. Blizzard stated the change was being made to combat forum trolling and flamewars, which have been a recognized problem.

What happened next may have been a surprise to Blizzard, or perhaps not, but it was not a surprise to anyone familiar with social technologies, Facebook, or with any interest in online privacy issues. Players were outraged. While few argued with the legitimacy of Blizzard’s concerns about trolling, the proposed solution was onerous enough to result in 2000+ pages of player responses in the North American WoW forums alone, over 44,000 mostly angry or simply astounded comments.

While Blizzard points out that the exposure is opt-in, it is only a choice in the sense that a player may choose to post or not post in the forums. While forum posters are merely a subset of Blizzard’s users, they are a vocal, invested, and passionate subset. They are exactly the players that Blizzard cannot to afford to lose or alienate. The mystery here is that Blizzard did exactly that. So, the question is why would Blizzard take that risk or did they simply get it completely wrong? read more »