"An Open Letter to Blizzard," or "It seems like everything I write online turns into a manifesto"

I have been a loyal Blizzard customer, as have millions of other people, for a very, very long time. I'm about to list my Blizzard cred–If you don't care about what products I bought, skip this paragraph. Warcraft II was the first PC game I ever beat and I have purchased it twice (once for the original, and again when you release Battle.net edition). I sunk a good two years of my life into online play of Diablo II and its expansion. I bought Warcraft III on release day, played through it a number of times, and eventually lost the disks and keys. Instead of simply pirating the game to satisfy my most recent craving, I actually re-bought it and its sequel in the Battle Chest. I own the WoW Battle Chest and the collector's edition of Wrath of the Lich King, in which I attained Alliance Loremaster (*almost* pre-nerf!) and helped my guild progress through nearly all of the 3.0-3.3 content (missing some hardmodes). Oh, and even though I got a hacked copy of Starcraft at a LAN like every other kid in America, I still bought the game AFTER THE FACT. Because I respect you, I enjoy the fruit of your hard work, and I admire your rapport with the fans on the forums. I am of the opinion that Blizzard is the single greatest video game studio on the planet.

Yeah, you guys rock. But I am extremely disheartened by Blizzard's plans to associate forum posts with a user's real name. Like, I'm about divorce you guys.

It's one thing to argue that being publicly associated with gaming can stigmatize people permanently and possibly hurt prospects for future jobs, friends, and dates. While I agree with my greasy-faced compatriots that this is indeed a noteworthy issue, I don't even want to bring that any further into the conversation, because it is so vastly overshadowed by a bigger problem–that you intend to willfully compromise the personal information of your most loyal fans.

What the hell, man? Mandatory Real IDs on the forums? As a student of computer science and being raised alongside the internet, I have come to respect that "real name" and "online" are two of the scariest things you can put together in a sentence. Even before the prevalence of social networking, search engines made it trivially easy to find out information about people. Any non-idiot knows that the world wide web WAS F'ING DESIGNED TO TURN SMALL PIECES OF INFORMATION INTO LARGE PIECES OF INFORMATION. With a single piece of information--a name, a phone number, an e-mail address, a flickr page, a photo, a school, pretty much anything, all but the most meticulously-protected identities unravel themselves when massaged the right way with the benevolent demon-god that is Google.

You and I both know that people are stupid. I am stupid, and I have said stupid things on the internet. Do you think I really enjoy having a poorly-written GameFAQs walkthrough for The Oregon Trail associated with my 22-year-old self? Nope, and even though I'm different than I was when 15-year-old Cary wrote about how to get from virtual Missouri to virtual Oregon, anyone who searches for my real name will find that FAQ. Time on the internet is, in a sense, binary. Sure, you can read timestamps and view threaded discussions and have the illusion of the passage of time, but really, all of the content in the universe falls into two categories: "posted online" or "not yet posted online." There is no statute of limitations, no expiration date, no magic killswitch that makes your online past disappear. There's not even a surefire way to give new content preferential treatment. No amount of apologies or explanations can erase a heated flamewar from 2003 or a hasty Tweet with swears in it.

Because of the internet's nasty habit of being a repository of human knowledge, I have serious concerns about the safety of your users–my online friends–if you were to start associating real names with online personas:

Let's say I get royally destroyed by an Undead Rogue in PVP (lol that wouldn't happen because I'm Paladin aka best class in the game, but just run with it). I mean, I get stun locked so hardcore that there's literally nothing I can do. This happens over and over and over, and he does a /spit to make it even worse. I pop over to a toon on his faction and send him a few tells about what I did to his mother last night, but he blocks me. But I'm still really, really mad about this dude, so I head on over to the ol' forums. Depending on what is associated with his character before this shift, I might have all sorts of juicy tidbits--maybe a reference to a location… maybe a flickr page… maybe even an e-mail address. Couple that with his real name (which would be pretty easy to get by just calling him out as a no-life mouthbreather and waiting for a response), and I'm all set to find out where this guy lives. By using public phone directories, as well as Googling any associated online handles, e-mail addresses, and finding his Facebook page, I can probably glean enough info to drive to his house and stun-lock his face with a crowbar.

Now, like I said, I play Paladin and I wouldn't get stun-locked by a Rogue, nor would I hit someone with a crowbar, but I can't honestly believe that there's not someone out there, playing your games, who wouldn't consider it.

Here's some proof of how creepy the internet is. I am about to seriously creep you out. I'm going to pick out a good-looking name from the credits of World of Warcraft (which I can find online, duh). Hmm, I choose "Eric Henze." That sounds like a relatively unique name. I don't know who that guy is, and I'm sure he's an extremely talented, wonderful individual. Let's see what we can find out about him.

EDIT: (italic text is added since original posting) I've decided that I have demonstrated the point about identity insecurity online and that this post has been viewed by enough people that I should probably get rid of the mini-biography. It has served its purpose. For those of you reading this for the first time, I shall summarize: I went on to show step-by-step how I found this person's screenname, location, workplace, work address, telephone number, home address, photograph, a photo of his house, his wife's name & photo, his college, his high school, his employment history, and so on. You can do this for most anyone under the age of 40. The purpose was not to target any individual, but rather to show just how easy it is to find out someone's detailed personal information online once you know their name. I want to thank Mr. Henze for being an unwitting subject of this demonstration, and I hope I have not caused him any hardship. Like I said before, I chose his name randomly from the credits of WoW.

I'll stop here, but I'm sure I could go on. The important message to take from this demonstration is that I started with ONLY the first and last name of someone listed in the credits of WoW–information that you, Blizzard, provided me.

Very few of us are immune to Google. I am certainly not immune, you are not immune, your mom is probably not immune. This is the power of the internet, and it's f'ing scary. By making forum users associate their online lives with their offline identities, you open up your users to a huge can of worms full of stalkers, prank phone calls, unwanted pizzas, and possibly even physical harm. Even the most careful of internet users are bound to slip up at some point. You'll notice that a good chunk of the information I was able to dig up about ol' Eric wasn't even put online by him!

For many gamers, forums are an indispensable resource and community. Please don't force us to put our lives at risk just because we want to chat with strangers about a video game.

Sincerely,

me

P.S. Cataclysm better not suck.