Thaddeus Black
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Dear Editor:
When in 1996 I first played e-mail Diplomacy on Ken Lowe's automated Judge, online play was by today's standards a primitive affair. You began by registering, submitting your real name along with your e-mail address to the Judge's administrator. You hid behind no alias (I doubt that it occurred to many of us to try). You had theretofore used your real name in postal Diplomacy, after all, else how would the post office have delivered your mail?
The early 21st-century world of Google, Facebook and the online identity thief, in which every act might accrete to one's trivially searchable permanent record, had not then arrived. We had no inkling of it. Even Diplomacy World existed (as you better than anyone know) on unelectronic paper alone.
By 1996, the digital revolution had indeed begun, yet who among us fathomed the threat it would one day pose to privacy? I did not fathom the threat, at any rate. A sobering thought: In 1967, when I was born, one enjoyed perhaps more privacy, less potential notoriety, if one's name appeared in The Wall Street Journal, than if one's name appears in Diplomacy World today.
Do you remember the days in which, if you were male and were old enough to have subscribed to telephone service, your name and address automatically appeared in the local telephone directory? You did not worry much about this. Now you have a cell phone and no one can look you up. How things have changed!
In Diplomacy, it is now normal to play online under an undignified alias like (these are actual examples of players with whom I am unacquainted) 2ndWhiteLine, VashtaNeurotic, Hellenic Riot and DeathLlama8. And who can blame such players, really? At my age, maybe it no longer much matters, but if I were today a university undergraduate, 30 years younger, I would hardly wish to post my real name in a gaming forum for future employers to google. Would you?
I do not say that my generation had more taste at that age. Maybe we had less. At least, though, we had our real names to use. Using one's real name, who would abandon a game in progress? Some did abandon, of course; many did not. After all, one had one's good name to protect.
The past was admittedly never so fine as memory makes it. The past use of real names once intensified conflicts, maybe. The controversial John Beshara became a fixture of the hobby, and a lightning rod. The controversial DeathLlama8? Not so much.
But still, when plain names have given way to awkward aliases, something worth preserving has been lost.
I have no answers. Have you?
I have a name, though, and even an address, with which I still have the privilege to sign,
Thaddeus H. Black
4042 Eggleston Road
Pearisburg, Virginia 2413
4
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2331
[[I have no answers either, but I certainly agree with you. If I tried I could list somewhere between 100 and 200 people I consider friends – or close friends – that I found through my years in the Diplomacy hobby but whom I still have never met face to face. The minimization of the game from THE GAME, and the hobby from THE HOBBY, is a sad realization for most of us who remember the excitement of postal zines, and the personality that flowed from the pages, the postal letters, the subzines, the countless house parties. I don’t think this is a case of “good old days syndrome.” I think we need to do whatever we can to bring the personal side of Diplomacy back into the hobby, ehether you’re playing face-to-face or on a website.
How to do that is the real question. There are still a few zines out there, including mine and Jim Burgess’ if you just want to start with Diplomacy World staff members, and in there we try to include plenty of non-Diplomacy material. But there must be others ways?]]
Meanwhile in Germany...
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