Anonymity on Designing Virtual Worlds

Life with a Backspace

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Starting a new character is like backspacing over your identity mistakes and retyping them a different way. It’s only possible in virtual worlds ¹.

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.

The Name Problem

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In a virtual world, you are represented by, represent, or are an individual. The world fiction may pretend otherwise, for example, by allowing hive minds (for example, ant nests) or shared-mind couples (for example, Tweedledum and Tweedledee), but these are mere conceits. You are associated with a single, sentient game object: your character ¹. So that people can refer to your character in conversation and commands, that character must have a label; in other words, a name.

Image

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Traditionally, virtual worlds make a distinction between stats (short for “statistics”) and knowledge. Stats are what characters have (strength, dexterity, magic points, and so on); knowledge is what players have (how to bring down a dragon, the route to the citadel, that player B is an idiot, and so on). The virtual world knows everything about stats and nothing about knowledge; for this reason, the terms tangibles and intangibles are used when referring to attributes of characters ¹ as opposed to attributes of players. A player’s knowledge of tangibles is itself intangible, of course.