"In all but a few cases there is no need to hide who you are."

Unless you're, say, strongly against current government's actions and criticize them. While your boss is a member/sympathizer/donor of the ruling party and fires you on some other pretext.

Or if you're applying for a job, and the employer decides to google your name and finds less than moderate posts you wrote when you were in your late teens/early twenties.

Or if you're gay and local skinheads decide to compile a list of targets.

Or if you announce you'll be off the forum for 2-3 weeks because of vacation, and burglars pay a visit to your apartment.

I think I could come up with several more ideas. But you get the point, eh?

The real Ian Goodman

All the other Ian Goodmans

Are just imitating.

Word to big bird.

Context! Context is important! Jumping immediately to assumptions of tyranny and insurgency when discussing video games forums is likely to get you the same kind of response as actually talking about such on video game forums: that the poster of such is a whiny girl, with no reflexes and less savvy, and a loose but abrasive moral character (not to mention having several body parts in the same conditions).

No, I am Ian Godman, and so is my wife.

and so is my wife.

"Context! Context is important!"

Fair enough, maybe your current or future employers wouldn't google your name (however, I just found my posts on EVE and IMDb forums) and find out, for instance, you're secretly a member of goth subculture. :-)

However, did you get to the part of my post where I wrote "Or if you're gay and local skinheads decide to compile a list of targets."? Because I guarantee you that this situation can happen on WoW forum. Whether you're gay, listen to punk or you just root for locally unpopular football team... people have been beaten for those reasons.

Well, on some of the game forums I frequent, opposing the government is a pretty heavy theme running through certain threads. Maybe that's because my government (the Australian one) is full of clueless tards who keep trying to legislate things that are really bad news for gamers. Really bad news for all Australians, in fact, but game forums are one of the places where discussions of such take place because most of the rest of the population are unthinking sheep who understand little more about the internet than the government themselves.

Personally, I don't really care what happens on the WoW forums, but "first they came for the WoW players..."

I am the real Ian Godman, maybe not the only one but defiantly one that is not stupid enough to tell anyone on the internet were I live.

Right now, people can find out your name in the game if you have RealID enabled, whether you add them or not:

http://www.wow.com/2010/07/06/security-flaw-allows-addons-to-expose-full-real-life-names-witho/

Basically it looks like this idea wasn't just badly thought out, but the implementation of the whole RealID system was badly thought out.

Thecowking.

Killing that whiny emo patricide was the best thing that came out of Wrath.

SC2 has a few big issues, like the splitting of campaigns into games/expansions, the LAN thing, the free WoW pet with the CE.

Bah I say, bah and humbug!

So why did this happen? Because you have an environment were its not only possible but there is no penalty for doing it.

What happened to Bashiok is unacceptable behaviour to any civilised person. If perpetrators can not hide in dark corners then they think before they act.

There is no security in obscurity, knowing you are insecure might not be a comfortable feeling but in reality because of that feeling you are more secure.

They want their argument back. What's a job with kids got to do with anything? Besides they're not applying it retroactively, so choose not to get involved in the forums.

You realise that *everyone* will have their real name, don't you? So anyone doing the abusing will be identified as well. Not to mention that I'm sure not everyone's name is a unique identifier.

I find it astounding that we're taking such offence to the notion - real names would have been the de facto standard around 15 years ago.

If it matters to you - don't use the forums.

Anyone doing the abusing *on the forums* will be identified as well.

"What's a job with kids got to do with anything?"

What if you are in a guild, and your guild leader finds out you are actually his maths teacher?

How's that going to work out in class?

for massively misrepresenting the argument.

If your attention span is long enough, here's the full thing:

http://www.spinksville.com/

...unless they're reading, not posting.

They already mentioned the case of the one WoW dev, but to see how this will play out, one needn't look any further than 4chan. Thousands of players will have hundreds of prank calls, pizzas ordered to their houses, addresses and phone numbers published online.

Blizzard has been a pisspoor company since Activision acquired it and WoW has been dead since Sunwell.

... did not come around as a result of attempting to be open and clear about people's identities, but rather being WRONG about what their own settings were doing, changing what those settings are without notice or analysis of the cascaded effects, and the complete shock to users that something input into a website might actually ever come back out. I doubt that there would have been anywhere near the controversy were there the simple agreement upfront of "You have no privacy here. Don't type anything you don't want known by everyone, indexed by anything, forever. If you don't like it, use some other service."

we meet again...

It's when my first name is combined with my surname and then combined with the wit only a four year old or forum troll possesses that it becomes an issue.