{"id":192,"date":"2010-11-12T18:40:01","date_gmt":"2010-11-12T18:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=192"},"modified":"2014-01-12T13:19:08","modified_gmt":"2014-01-12T13:19:08","slug":"worlds-can-collide-sometimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=192","title":{"rendered":"Worlds Can Collide Sometimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Battle.Net<\/a> the Blizzard partner site that caused a kerfuffle over the way they wanted to engage with Facebook and display real names on the forums has evolved into quite a useful tool. I can now talk to friends who are playing on different realms or even in different games in the Blizzard family and now that they’ve removed the threat of Facebook, real names on the forum and displaying your friends of friends when they shouldn’t be being displayed, it’s now something worthwhile.<\/p>\n

However, at some point this sort of tool will be more beneficial if it extends across other worlds, such as Second Life, and allows you to talk to non Blizzard game users. There’s also something else they’ve introduced that’s handy, an authenticator<\/a>. Basically, with this little USB device, you can only login to your account or the game, whilst it’s plugged in, and whereas such a device is far from perfect, it’s an improvement in security.<\/p>\n

There is also a mobile phone version of this app, which you can download onto….well your mobile phone and there is also what is called a “Dial-in Authenticator” for World of Warcraft users in the United States, this is a free optional security tool that gives you a pin number and has security controls in place to spot odd usage of your account, such as you login from a different area than usual, you’ll be called and asked to confirm that it was actually you logging in.<\/p>\n

Second Life, with users having a lot more to lose, could benefit from authentication tools such as this, which makes one wonder why they are not more widely available for a variety of worlds and games.<\/p>\n

Vivox<\/a> can provide voice services for a variety of games and virtual worlds, including Eve-Online and Second Life, although voice comms are currently localised to the one world we’re in, long term it would make sense to allow us to communicate across worlds.<\/p>\n

The current drawback of course is that with tools like this, we’re tied to being online to our friends, and sometimes we all want to go a bit Greta Garbo and explore alone without distractions, once they get their heads around the fact that sometimes we don’t want to go where everybody knows our name, these tools will have great expansion possibilities.<\/p>\n

The beauty of tools like this, is that with a bit of tweaking, we don’t have to display our real names to all and sundry, currently battle.net displays your real name, as the only people on my list are people I know in real life, that’s not an issue for me, long term it will be an issue for me if they insist on not allowing me to use a display name, I simply won’t go along with expansion, there’s no need for the real name to be attached as you have to know someone else’s ID address to even request a friendship, at which point it will have already been explained whom that name is, or a choice of displaying a real name or a display name on a person by person basis would work.<\/p>\n

However what it all boils down to is these virtual worlds and games talking to each other, sharing a bit of the love and utilising their tools to expand usage of these useful tools beyond their existing realm.<\/p>\n

They could also, you know, do a bit of social networking, similar in theory to Avatars United, but with improved implementation, I was talking to someone only today who suggested Battle.Net could expand to be a virtual world social networking site, incorporating many different virtual worlds without having to give out your RL details like Facebook insist you should, at which point someone who plays Eve-Online piped up with “There’s already a site that does that, it’s called Avatars United or something like that” … I didn’t have the heart to tell him of its untimely end, but the potential for such a platform still exists, although the Zuckerberging of our identities is a very strong force, I still don’t buy that resistance is futile and I certainly don’t buy that it’s the only way to social network. Advertisers could still advertise, you don’t need to know someone’s name to draw up a profile of them from their online habits and interests, you simply need to be able to advertise to them, if you’re armed with the knowledge that someone is in a certain age range, plays Second Life or WoW and has an interest in places like this, advertisers can target that market.<\/p>\n

When I login to Amazon, they have recommendations for me based on my previous purchasing and browsing history, this isn’t based on my real name, it’s based on my account usage, something that’s worth considering for advertisers, there’s a vast ocean of people to advertise to, people who will purchase goods and services but don’t want to share every nook and cranny with all and sundry out there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Battle.Net the Blizzard partner site that caused a kerfuffle over the way they wanted to engage with Facebook and display real names on the forums has evolved into quite a useful tool. I can now talk to friends who are playing on different realms or even in different games in the Blizzard family and now … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Worlds Can Collide Sometimes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,14,15,647],"tags":[47,48,19,1022,1024],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6rJUK-36","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3537,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions\/3537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}