THAT is a burning question on everyone's minds at the moment. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a need or want. Some of us care that you know who we are, some of us don't.
For a quick "how to do internets" I recommend you go read Ophelie's blog post here. She beat me to the punch with that one *shakes fist* I had mine all half written, and BAM work slammed me in the face and I didn't get time. Anyway, go read it, it's everything I was going to write. The short version for anyone on the internets is "Don't put anything on the internet that you would not want your enemies to see and use against you" I highlighted that in this post where someone tried to troll me for gkicking their sorry butt out of my guild.
RealID is here, like it or not. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. Pretty easy, huh? Well, not so much. Until very recently Forums V2 were going to use your RealID as well. Blizz thought this for a few reasons which I will very briefly go through and slam with a big slammy thing.
The main reason, it seems, was to prevent trolling on the forums. This move seems to come out of fear and desperation. Motivating people to not troll each other because the "know who you are" is going to create an atmosphere of fear to keep people in line. Fear, while effective in the short term, will never engender the environment they are looking to create - one of constructiveness and harmony or some othe hippy concepts.
The other reason was to encourage people to know each other. I am going to let that statement hang itself.
So, how do you make forums nicer, then?
Blizz, you are doing it all arse about. Don't expect flowers to grow in a garden when you keep stomping on everything that looks even a little bit like a weed. We will not self regulate in an environment where we fear real world retribution for trolling. You need to create an environment where self regulation is the rule. Forums like Reddit, metafilter and even 4Chan (as scarey as that place can be) are entirely anonymous and can do amazing things because the community self regulates. Stupid posts (and posters) are down modded and you cant see them. Good posts (and posters) are up modded and their words given weight.
If you are still worried about trolls, then make sure that posters cant hide behind their alts. Simply put a tooltip in where you click on that poster, you can see all their toons. Or, don't give people a choice in their "posting" avatar. You get one avatar for the forums. That's it, no hiding on that level 1 alt you made just to flame that guy. It's you - warts and all - and your one avatar.
The last thing that needs to happen is less banning - counter intuitive, I know. Blizzard need to actually stop banning people for the tiniest little upset person on the internet. Half the issue of trolling has come about because people want to see how far they can push their comments before getting banned by Blizzard or get a response from a "blue". It is a game to them. Remove the incentive, remove (some of) the issue. Simply having people downmod comments so you cant see them, or any posts they make, and eventually after they have experienced people not reading their posts because they are a dick, then remove people with consistently low mods.
Encouraging people to know each other?
This is the part where I get into realID in game.
I don't know about you guys, but I have managed perfectly well so far to communicate with people without having my real name plastered everywhere. If I like someone, I ask them for their MSN, their email address, their blog, their phone number. I ask them to join my guild. I get them on my guild forums. There are multitudinous ways to communicate with people if you think they are worth your time. But the point is, I ask them for the way in which they want me to contact them. Having it forced on me that people know my real name is removing a choice from me. Personally, I don't mind if people know who I am. I have no issues with people knowing me - but I get to choose who those people are. I do not like that Blizzard has taken it upon themselves to tell me that the guy I want to chat with on that other realm when he is on standby for a raid I am running has to know my real name to get whispers from me. It isn't the anonymity, it is the implication that I don't know how to do my own social networking. It is the arrogance that I am incapable of forming relationships if Blizzard doesn't hold my hand.
There also comes into this the issues of minors; this was actually the kicker for me. What of all the people under the age of 18 who have accounts in their real name? What options have their guardians to protect them? The fact that you cannot change Bnet account names easily, how are those people going to deal with this very real privacy issue. Just pause and think about this for a moment. Can you imagine the stink caused when everyone now knows you are a girl and underage?
Which brings me (briefly) to feminism and girl gamers.
From a feminist point of view, it is sometimes hard enough in a game to be yourself. You play a male avatar, you dont talk in vent. No one knows you are a girl. And why is that? Because the gaming world has a looooooong way to go with feminist issues. I am not going to go into the details here, it's tangential and there are plenty of resources to go read on the plight of girl gamers. RealID will force this vulnerable group to be even more exposed and vulnerable if they want to use it. Women will not post on the forums, they will not use realID and their options in game will become even more limited and marginalised than they are now. It removes our ability to play a game for the fear of people knowing who we are, the fear of backlash, of harassment. There is a fear of this because it happens!! Forcing this out in the open is, I believe, discriminating against these people.
So what do you propose NER?
I want choices.
I want to be able to turn off "friend of friend" in game. I want to be invisible to some people if I want to. I want to have the option to "show real name" or default to a BNet Avatar/handle that is directly linked to me and my forum posts. I want +/- modding on the forums so the community can self regulate. I want less reward for bad behaviour (ie blue attention/banning).
Don't get me wrong, RealID is great! I use it. But I am very wary of who I add (at the moment only people I already know in Real Life(tm) or explicitly trust to not harass friends of friends) because of all of the reasons above. I want my options and I would use RealID a lot more.
It is so close to being great - add a few more features so we can choose how we use it, Blizzard. Let us make our own decisions and choices on these things. Give us options.
ETA:
Blizz have backed down on the forums using RealID, although your account "real name" is still being used for the ingame chat. I do not see that they will change their long term goal of having people use their account names for forums (fora?) anytime soon.
They have not yet described what they are going to do instead in their V2 forums. THAT will certainly be interesting, I dare say. Will they just let people get used to the idea ingame first, then change it over later? Who knows. But I tell you what, it is interesting... no doubt about it.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Logging you in...
Comments by IntenseDebate
Morgan · 765 weeks ago
"This move seems to come out of fear and desperation. Motivating people to not troll each other because the "know who you are" is going to create an atmosphere of fear to keep people in line. "
It certainly hasn't in any of the forums that use real names that I have experience with - both public and private. However, I do find that forums that use real names (or some other sort of gatekeeping / validation) have a much higher quality of discourse than those that encourage anonymity. In fact, I can't think of any really high quality communities that are both large, and anonymous, and homes to high quality discourse as a matter of course. That isn't to say that high quality discussion can't exist on anon fora, just that it's generally well outnumbered by poor discussion - even when rating systems exist.
If we're holding 4Chan up as a desired standard, then sure - I tend to think that sets the bar pretty low, though. It does make the comment about protecting under 18's seem a little out of place - 4chan is nothing if not unsafe for ... well, anyone who puts a foot wrong, in fact. Speaking of which, Facebook is a real name forum and it's for 13+ (by terms of use, anyhow) and it doesn't seem to have caused the complete ruin of all of its underage users. Are WOW players really that much worse as human beings than we can't possibly imagine how anyone could be safe and a teenager in their grasp? Or do we believe that because WOW currently feels like a fundamentally unsafe environment - precisely because of it's current anonymity?
A their core, differently communities behave differently due to their userbase and common interest - BUT (and here's the strong but) they're also shaped by the rule structures in place. Really shaped. There's more in common in the real name communities I'm part of even though the topics are widely varied. And the things in common are quality discussion and respect - not fear. Fear has never entered into it.
There's a place for anon fora, for sure. The WOW forums are one of the largest userbase online (and one of the greatest cesspools short of youtube comments as well) - I was really interested (from a sociological perspective) to see how RealID would play out. And now I'm kind of sad that's not going to happen, because it would have been a great case study.
And that case study, and the movement towards non-anon parts of the net, is much more important than this single case - there's been a real and visible swing towards racism and sexism as the internet has grown, driven by the anonymity of the internet and the willingness of people to embrace taboo when there's no repercussions. It's saddening. Hiding identity isn't the solution to that (although it's a great way to bypass gendered discussions in it's own right, and good on it for that). Anon (I believe) is the cause of the feminist issues you discuss tangentially - not the solution.
All in all though - you can't change a river midstream, much as I would have liked to watch them try!
brangwen 48p · 765 weeks ago
Re: Fear
The way the move was presented by Blizzard was "we don't like you trolling our forums, so we are going to make it so everyone knows who you are. There, that will fix the trolling issue" And that makes it a solution by the use of fear. Fear that if you post something you are accountable, when previously you weren't.
Now, I have no issue with being accountable for my words. The issue I have is that the *change* is fear motivation. From a general point of view, I 100% agree with you. Forums initiated using your real persona as an avatar are an interesting idea, will create better conversations and in general be of a higher quality. But, the difference there is you choose to enter or not, as opposed to here where you HAD the chance to be anonymous and it is being removed from you.
Heh, I can remember back in the day experimenting with Roleplaying Zelzany's Amber and your character was *yourself* and oh man, that was a delve into people's psyche's I never needed to see!
An example of high quality anonymous discourse? Reddit. Using 4chan as an example was possibly detrimental to my argument because I didn't actually go into why I think it is a powerful movement and something that, for all it's bad points, achieves some amazingly positive things.
My issue here is the motivations for the change and how they were presented. And that this is a GAME that people use to escape the real world for whatever reasons they have (and believe me, there is no one in WoW that I have encountered that does not have a reason for escapism or using it that way. Hmmm That is an interesting post topic). Forcing them back into the real world is not what the userbase is looking for in this area of the internet.
[ end part 1 ]
brangwen 48p · 765 weeks ago
Now into facebook:
I have serious issues with facebook and privacy. It's real name, it's internet searchable, and I am VERY DAMN CAREFUL what I put on my facebook. There is an example I choose to use when people ask me about facebook. I have had my work life questioned and compromised due to one comment on my facebook - and I am the most open and honest person out there. If I said it, I SAID IT, I'm me, warts and all. However, my professional career is impacted by what I put out on the internet. And, my personal life is not my professional career's business to know about, unless it IMPACTS my ability to work. Linking Me to my Personal Behaviours to my Career is not ideal. And not because I am ashamed of who I am, but because other people question and judge me.
People are prejudiced against me on a regular basis due to my MS. It 100% happens. I have been passed over for promotion more than once (4 times in fact) DIRECTLY DUE TO THIS. Now, it has never been stated that was the reason, but there have always been other people "more suitable" than myself, when everyone expected me to be promoted.
I have a friend who is a psychiatrist. He will not go near facebook with a barge pole. He wants no footprint on the internet for any of his patients to even have a chance of finding him outside of the boundaries he sets for interactions. He also does not want his friends to become involved, norhave his friends actions impact his career by association. I think, for him, that is a wise move. But it also limits his ability to enjoy what the rest of us have.
Re: discrimination
I 100% agree where you are coming from here. The initial cause is anonymity, however, now it is also the escape for people to hide who they are in both directions. The point being here, that the core of these forums is a computer game to play, and being able to hide allows people to play who wouldn't normally play.
Is it Blizzard's job to create social change because they happened to create the biggest MMORPG in the world? That I am not sure of, and I am not sure they are the right people to do the job.
I can list probably 10 people immediately who instantly went to the forums and DELETED all their forum posts Just In Case this realID was retroactive. These were not people who trolled. These were people who did not want their personal leisure time affect their work/family lives.
In the long run, lack of anonymity will probably create what we want, I am fairly sure we want the same thing at the core of it. But as a player of the game, a game that still has a massive stigma attached to it, I am not happy that I can be "found" in real life to be a gamer, and I am not comfortable with that concept spilling over into my completely unrelated professional life. I don't know that I have the energy to fight the fight that needs to happen to remove the discrimination inherent in the system.
All that said (pre coffee mind you, so it is a bit rambly), I am quite happy to use RealID as is. But I really do understand why people DON'T want to use it. And I would use it far more if I had a few more options on how I get to use it. Linking a BNet Avatar (and you only get the one, no hiding behind alts) to your RealID in game and on forums, and making YOU accountable for ALL your posts and interactions with people would go a long way to sorting out the issues on the forums. Get banned on the forums, get banned in all games. Get kicked out of the forums, go buy the game and start again. I feel, for blizzard's specific problem, should go a long way to solving their trolling issues. But, we don't get to watch the social exercise of RealID being an actual REAL ID.
morgan · 765 weeks ago
We're in an interesting window right now where we think we might be able to have privacy online. That's not going to last, because technology is going to catch up shortly - and it'll do so retroactively. Facial recognition tech will get to the point that every video and photo with you in it can be instantly searched as easily as you could google a name now. In addition, due to geometry tracking, they'll know where those images were taken, and from that be able to extrapolate your movements. Then they can use writing style analysis, along with topic interest, to link all of your online posts under various names together.
In a lot of ways, your psych friend is wise to steer clear - people today are behaving in very revealing ways online without realising it. Pseudonyms only delay the inevitable - that's the main reason I switched to using my real name online however many years ago - so that I wouldn't be living with the false impression of privacy. It's also one of the reasons I don't get overly excited by things like RealID.
brangwen 48p · 765 weeks ago
I even gave myself a challenge one day. One of my guildmates was pretty wary about himself and his online presence. I decided one day to try to find out where he lived. Based on a couple of throw away comments on forums, I managed to track down his home phone number and address. I had the information confirmed at a later date by him unknowingly (he sent me a document to proof read which had his contact information on it, but that was his choice to provide that to me).
We are no longer anonymous.
WoW specifically, in fact, I have been using RealID more and more ingame. I find that I look at friends of friends and honestly, most of the time I don't know who they are, so I actually don't really care. I don't know which toon relates to which real name unless they choose to tell me. But it still brings me back to the reasons people are playing the game in the first place, which generally seems to be escapism from Real Life. To have that forcibly put on us is a real issue and what everyone was upset about. To me, the implication that I don't know how to socially interact online was insulting in the extreme. That Big Brother Blizz knew best really made my blood boil. Perhaps that was not the actual intention of it all, but that was the way it came across in their press releases.
And since that is the only information we are presented with, those press releases are VITAL to the player base taking on board changes, especially with a playerbase as vocal and passionate as WoW's.
Gwennie · 765 weeks ago
brangwen 48p · 765 weeks ago
They have not yet described what they are going to do instead in their V2 forums. THAT will certainly be interesting, I dare say. Will they just let people get used to the idea ingame first, then change it over later? Who knows. But I tell you what, it is interesting... no doubt about it.