Thursday, March 10, 2011

Fighting the G.I.F.T.

It is widely accepted that communication on the internet is often subject to John Gabriel's G.I.F.T., the Greater Internet F-wad Theory, stating a normal person given anonymity and an audience will say things he wouldn't tell you to your face. Basically, if there are no consequences, people feel free to say whatever they want, however offensive that is. Worst thing that can happen is an offensive post being moderated, so why hold back?

Well, EA and Bioware decided to fight that G.I.F.T.: You can only post on their forums with your EA account, so you are known to them. And if you say anything offensive, you can be banned FROM ALL YOUR EA GAMES. Even single-player games like Dragon Age 2 are affected, because these days such games have an online account check as copy protection. So EA / Bioware can hand out temporary and permanent bans that will prevent you from playing any EA game with an online activation. You can be sure that the SWTOR forums will be a *lot* more pleasant than the WoW forums due to this. Until, of course, Blizzard follows suit, locking you out of WoW, Starcraft 2, and Diablo 3, whenever you post a rant on the WoW forums.

In related news, I'm in negotiations with Steam to make them hand out 72-hour bans to everybody posting troll comments on this blog. You have been warned! Big Brother is watching you!

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