After all social networking is all the rage with real names and embarrassing photos. The ”game space” is totally different Blizzard has come to realise.
”Facebook has had a lot of influence, a lot of influence on me personally, in both positive and negative ways,” said Battle.net project director Greg Canessa. RealID required both first and surnames from users which helps ‘link up’ friends.
The problem was this planned to be applied to the community forums where users prefer anonymity. ”There are some very interesting social dynamics that are going on around the perception of anonymity, and what social networks like Facebook and MySpace have done to interfere with that veil of anonymity in the online space,” he added.
”I think it’s an interesting sociological phenomenon that you have, in which people are completely comfortable putting their name, face, kids, wife and personal information out there for the world to see in Facebook, yet they’re not willing to do, in some cases, similar things in the game space.” RealID caused a huge backlash from users.
Blizzard still has RealID and in fact tries to offer incentives for gamers to adopt the system by providing additional features. It’s in no way mandatory like it would have been.
”We were a little surprised by the controversy,” admitted Canessa. RealID is their branding of community features like an in-game social suite letting friends cross-game chat and discover each other quickly for match making etc.
”That part was really, really positive, and that’s where the Battle.net team has been focused,” said Canessa. ”The forum stuff was kind of a side thing. The forums aren’t that big of a deal relative to Blizzard’s overall business. And so we were a little surprised.”
Blizzard do ”listen to our community. They didn’t like it, and we quickly moved off of it.” Were you dead set against having your anonymity sacrificed by RealID?
