“RealID” is what the name suggests: it displays your real life name to friends once you have accepted their request to be a RealID friend. well, i have no issues with that. people that are my real life friends naturally know my real name and vice versa. however, there is a little twist to RealID: a little feature called “friends of friends” quite similar to Facebook with the most notable difference that Facebook offers several layers of privacy options (ok that is up for debate but still) and you can always just use a nickname or fake name on Facebook. RealID uses naturally the name of the WoW account which usually is the name on your credit card and hence you cannot really change it or billing will be messed up.

as mentioned i have no problem with real life mates knowing my name in a virtual world but i am worried by the fact that my real name is visible to friends of my friends who i may not know at all. the most popular argument in this debate is “oh come on, it’s just your name and not your address or any other personal details”. well, it might be just my name but a simple google search using my real name does come up with things about me (professional things mind you) that i do not want people i play a game with to know. i strongly believe in keeping the professional life and the personal life separated and RealID threatens to break down that separation.

one great aspect of the virtual world is that you can be whoever you want to be, you can create a virtual self that can have as much or little in common with your real self as you want it to. mind you, virtual worlds like WoW are a fantasy after all. it’s not like i have something to hide from my virtual friends but it kinda defies the purpose of a virtual life as outlined by Sherry Turkle in her book “Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet“: virtual worlds offer us the chance to have multiple identities and experiment with them as we form in true postmodern tradition something that can be called “patchwork identity”. i am a female tauren deathknight in WoW and a media scientist in real life and i want to keep it that way.

i strongly hope that Blizzard will add some privacy options to RealID in the future that either offer you to display a nickname or deactivates the “friends of friends” feature. i like RealID but as it is right now it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.