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Comment by sturadnidge | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Facebook ever grokked the concept of multiple personas - LinkedIn is for my work persona, Steam (and Origin, Twitch etc) is for my gaming persona, and on Twitter I can have different accounts for each.

As long as Facebook requires a single account with real identity, it will never be anything more than for my family & acquaintances persona. Most gamers I know feel the same... maybe we're in the minority, but maybe not. Be interesting to know how many Steam accounts are linked with Facebook as an indication of how this might play out (aside from the potential for exclusive titles etc).

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I don't think you are a minority. the average gamer on a given popular game is usually going on about how fat your mom is in between rounds or on chat or whatever (it's worse than this, of course, i'm being nice).

Somehow, i don't think they are going to be up for tying that to their real identity.

There are two possibilities. This either massively improves the discourse on games like COD and the equivalent of every xbox live game ever. Or, people don't use it, because they don't want that. I"m going to go with the second.

Put another way: can you imagine the average gamer in COD wanting to tie their character "XXXAyeCarambeHarambeXXX420 to their real identity?

If the quality of comments on facebook are any indication I am not sure it will make a huge difference on discourse quality.

Or YouTube after Google plus is a better example. We've been there, done that, real names do not improve niceness.

These rude 'average gamers' you speak of are the vocal minority in my experience... Most of us are normal people.

In what game, precisely? Seriously, these platforms are all known for it. I've pretty most major triple-a multiplayer titles in the past 15 years, and they are all like this.

Do normal people exist? Sure. Are they the majority? Uh, no. :) It's not even a close contest.

This is even pretty easy to see. Pick 100 random top youtube videos of these games. Count the amount of racism, what have you going on in voice chat, team chat, whatever.

I say 100 just so one doesn't say "well, it's just these guys". It's everyone.

Do you actually play games or are you making things up from ill conceived stereotypes?

Yes. I play games enough that i have youtube videos of me and friends playing games that have millions of views, in fact.

Is this good enough for whatever bar you are trying to set?

(i'll note you didn't provide a retort to what i suggested, you instead just went to ad-hominem. So i'm going to assume you in fact, have no data that i'm wrong)

I've been almost exclusively playing Overwatch and Rocket League now for a good several months. The amount of offensive content isn't really any more than any other online community. It's rare. You get people who brag maybe, but no one has claimed to have sex with my mother in my entire time I have played that game. I've seen maybe a handful of racist terms dropped here and there, but those people are either chastised or ignored.

Idk, I just don't see what you see. What do you play?

Average gamers in CoD are not average gamers. So there's that.

Pick any triple A title with multiplayer.

Haven't noticed this at all on Titanfall 2 (pc)

I have multiple disparate 'personas' largely because I consider myself to be a fairly creative intellectual who is prone to considering and defending unpopular opinions that require nuance and maturity to understand. And I don't want some psychotic teenager thinking they're doing the world a favor by tracking me down and murdering me because they can't handle verbal disagreement appropriately.

Everything you said there is reasonable, but the way you expressed it is very off putting.

Everything I say is off-putting to someone. I'm inclined say your comment is off-putting, but I'm actually fine with letting people feel what they feel without leveraging emotional obligations at, or demanding hedging-rituals or pointless niceties from each other.

Though this criticism is really just a difference of culture: the ability to separate the useful truths from pleasant feelings is a high virtue where I come from.

I don't get it. What's off putting to you about this?

They are likely aware of this but know it would be too hard to get enough traction for a new brand. If they were really serious about it they would probably have to buy something with traction.

They actually already run one via Oculus.

As a counterpoint, for the few games I do play, I far prefer to use my real Facebook identity. Words with Friends in particular is most fun when I'm playing against my real friends. I also really like QuizUp.

Dinky little mobile games like words with friends fall into a different category than pc games. They are time-killers, and your gaming identity is not tied to an avatar that kicks ass in a virtual world. Your real identity for mobile games is simply to make finding someone to play the dinky game with easier on your phone.

The part which should bother a real world gamer is the MBA marketing pitch which goes:

"CONNECTING TO FACEBOOK, THE EA WAY.

Real world studies have shown that people are x% less likely to act out of troll if their real world ID is known

With Facebook we get significantly more targeting data or our demographics and potentially data on their income/parents."

I understand this, but this is a big gaming category, and may be the ultimate place that Facebook Gameroom succeeds in.

Netflix's change from their own review system to FaceBook killed it for me and angered their user base (which didn't effect them of course).

Facebook definately doesn't get the idea of different social landscapes for different aspects of life.

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/get-to-know-netflix-and-its-new-...

Did they? Or do they not care?

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