Open Letter (continued)
Thank you Jane and DLIMedia for your insightful responses to my original post. They have made me reconsider my hasty threat to un-friend people on Facebook who use “ARG accounts” to help separate their daily physical lives from their involvement in pervasive games.
Jane and David make some very compelling points about the utility of maintaining a certain level of anonymity in gaming, and on the internet in general. One of my original concerns was that one of these shill accounts was created solely for the purpose of identity theft. Having ARG accounts on some of these social media websites would help to protect against the inadvertent disclosure of personal information to shady game creators and other players. I might even create one for playing games in which I don’t know the designer.
So, I started thinking about what motivated me to post this letter in the first place. Trust. I realized that my ultimatum of “friend me with your real account or I’m going to unfriend you” was a little too knee-jerky of a reaction. All I was looking for was a gesture of trust from my “so-called friends” that reassured me that they were genuinely interested in building a friendship and not just my Facebook friend to gain access to my personal life. Jane made that gesture by telling me her real name. Ashley made that gesture by friending me with the same account that includes her close friends and family. (Thanks Ashley!)
I’m still going to break connections with “fake” Facebook accounts, but I’m going to be reviewing them on a case by case basis. If you own one of those accounts I encourage you, if you want to continue to maintain that Facebook friendship, to think about what kind of gesture of trust you can make in the next week or so.
