# Life with a Backspace

LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt)

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Starting a new character is like backspacing over your identity mistakes and retyping them a different way. It’s only possible in virtual worlds [^70].

Anonymity separates the real you from the virtual you. This has three effects:

- People in the virtual world won’t prejudge you on superficialities.

- Your real-world friends won’t judge you by your virtual-world actions.

- Your virtual-world friends won’t judge you by your real-world actions.

Without anonymity, your virtual actions have real-world effects and vice versa. If no one knows you’re the U.S. president, you can be yourself; if they do, you’re back to being the U.S. president.

It doesn’t usually take long for newbies to realize that anonymity means they can restart if they screw up. It’s pretty obvious. However, in practice it’s not actually as important as people often think. The longer you play a character, the more attached to it you become, and the more people come to know that character. You soon reach the stage where you’ve invested so much in that character that if you do screw up you would be very reluctant to throw it all away. Instead, you ride out the storm (and are perhaps a better person because of it).

This can lead to an extra level of anonymity. If you decided to create a second character, you might not want it to be associated with either your real self or your first virtual self. Anonymity lets you branch. Thus, we should think of anonymity [^71] as acting as a buffer between all your separate identities, not just the real and the virtual. When you start a new identity, your primary concern is to keep the old identities intact and separate. Therefore, the main advantage of anonymity is not that your new friends won’t find out about your other selves; rather it’s that your other friends won’t find out about your new self. It can be the other way round (for newbies and U.S. presidents), but mostly it isn’t. The virtual girl who doesn’t want her friends to know she’s a real-life guy has less to lose than the real-life guy who doesn’t want his friends to know he’s a virtual girl [^72].

It turns out that maintaining separate identities in the same virtual world can be quite difficult. Experienced Wild West telegraph operators were able to tell which of the other operators on their line they were communicating with from nuances in the way they tapped out the Morse code [^73]; it’s unsurprising, therefore, that players in virtual worlds can often detect other players by subtleties in the way they act and speak. If you always misspell a particular word, for example, people will notice. This means that anonymity across characters can’t always be relied on. There are ways to succeed, which I’ll discuss a little later; on the whole, though, people who feel they need anonymity should switch to either a different virtual world or a different incarnation of the same one.

An interesting side issue here is that although players will often mature quicker if they regularly start up new characters, most of them are reluctant to do so because of the time they have invested in their old ones. They therefore find themselves facing the same challenges as before, responding in the same ways, and generally not getting much out of the experience. Were they occasionally forced to change character (for example, by its erasing following virtual death), would this not perhaps lead to greater enjoyment for them in the long term? Probably, yes; however, if they knew that characters could die dead-dead after months of playing time, players perhaps wouldn’t sign up for a virtual world in the first place. This is the great tragedy of persona death in virtual worlds, which causes more problems than any other for designers. It is discussed in considerable depth later in this book.

Returning to the topic of anonymity, then: What are the implications of all this on virtual world design?

Well firstly, a certain degree of anonymity must be guaranteed. Clearly, the live team needs access to the real-world details associated with a character, but this information should be considered private. If there is any way that a regular player can uniquely identify another regular player without the latter’s permission, it’s not good. You might think that associating email addresses with every character is beneficial for community development, but that’s not how the majority of players will see it.

Secondly, it shouldn’t go too far. People want to have separate identities, not no identity. If every character looked the same, that would lead to anonymity. If you can’t tell people apart, everyone could be anyone. Identities should be constructible to as great (or shallow) a level of detail that a player wants. Anonymity is relative, between characters; it isn’t absolute for individual characters.

Finally, players should be able to start up new characters with relative ease. Players won’t grow if they can’t occasionally experiment, and they’ll eventually lose faith in the virtual world unless they can start afresh occasionally. This does not mean that they should be offered new accounts at a cheaper rate; rather, there should be several slots on their existing account so they can maintain several characters simultaneously (in practice, the absolute minimum is three, but five is normally enough for most people).

Well, that’s the traditional point of view.

There is another argument that says players should only have one account with only one character on it. In game worlds at least, most people use secondary characters either as mules (which screws up game balance) or as griefers (so they can act like jerks without fear of reprisal). In both instances, the virtual world would be better off without them. Furthermore, in a commercial setting you can check names, addresses, credit card numbers, and computer registry settings to ensure that people don’t simply buy a second account to use for their mule or griefer activities [^74].

This is the approach adopted by Star Wars Galaxies (although their hands were somewhat tied by the fact that the huge amount of data they store for each character is such that it would exceed their database’s capabilities to allow more than one character per account—well, that’s the official line anyway).

As it happens, none of these are particularly thorny issues for designers (although the number of characters per account may yet become so). The immediate problem with anonymity is practical rather than theoretical: It must be possible for characters to be referenced. This means they need a name. In a virtual world with half a million players, that’s a lot of names.


[^70]: And witness protection schemes.
[^71]: Because virtual identities are named and can be referenced, the term pseudonymity is preferred by some researchers in this context.
[^72]: As people spend more and more of their time in virtual worlds, this could change. When they spend most of it there (as in True Names, for example), people may want to protect their real-world identities the most.
[^73]: Their styles were known as their “signatures.”
[^74]: CompuServe allowed one character per account on British Legends. Some players therefore accumulated several accounts—a dozen or more in some cases—so they could have multiple characters in the game. Needless to say, these accounts did not come at a cheaper rate, either.