I can't help but wonder how much this move is tied to Blizzard's recent announcement that they are going to integrate Battle.net 2.0 with Facebook. My understanding is that the integration begins later this month with the beta testing for Starcraft 2. I have not found or read anything concerning the details of the deal that Blizzard and Facebook struck, but it would seem to me that a couple of things are apparent if these two services come together. 1) Facebook, by default, makes their participants' data public. If part of the idea is to integrate Friends Lists and social networks across both platforms, making Battle.net IDs public would seem to be a major part of such a move. 2) Facebook would most likely want access to Battle.net participants' data in order to monetize it, as they do with their own participants. I've grown more and more concerned about the power of companies like Facebook or Blizzard to dictate what constitutes "identitity" and how people manage their online personas. Mark Zuckerberg has used the rhetoric of "openness" and "integrity" to push Facebook's default stance of making their participants' data public. There are all sorts of scary questions about a company like Facebook deciding it has the right -- even the ethical obligation -- to determine what constitutes an online identity. For Blizzard, this seems to be expecially tricky considering their social networks are predicated upon fantasy spaces, like WoW or Starcraft. Part of the gaming experience is character creation, which includes a substantial amount of fiction that operates within the cultural contexts that attend fantasy role-playing. Thus, identities are an admixture of "the real" with fiction, and it is often impossible to really discern where the player ends and the avatar begins. Or, in many cases, some players feel their online avatars are better representations of themselves than anything they could muster in the brick and mortar world. Aspects of the fantasy role-play allow for identity exploration, and online spaces have always been far more accomodating of this kind of exploration. I doubt Blizzard will see major repercussions financially from this move, but I also doubt they understand some of the damage they might inflict upon their communities. What's worse, I'm increasingly afraid they may not care because any loss in paid subscriptions might be more than offset by potentially monetizing Battle.net participants' data -- which I highly suspect will happen, at least eventually. -- Dave Jones PhD Student Professional Writing and New Media Old Dominion University Vice Chair, SIGDOC ODU djone111@odu.edu