I just finished reading Gweneth Llewelyn’s post about the coming “Display Name” changes in Second Life (and, there is no doubt these changes are coming no matter how much we complain.) Pop over to her post to see what she says and then come back here. I’ll wait.
What bothers me the most about “Display Names” is that we are about to lose the one thing we have previously though to be unique. I’m not hopping mad about this (anymore), but I am concerned for all of the reasons Gweneth sited and more. In-world we have always been able to assume that if someone named Jon Appleseed IMed us or posted something to a chat group, it was really the same Jon Appleseed we’ve known before. We’ve never questioned this because, despite being able to change our appearance with abandon, our names have remained constant. This constancy is engrained into the culture of Second Life (and yes, I’m aware that not everyone agrees there even is a Second Life culture.)
The new constant will be the user name (in the form of firstname.lastname for us oldbies), and that user name will be visible if we go to the extra trouble of looking into a user’s profile. On the surface, however, we’ll see whichever name an avatar has chosen to display. As I said earlier, I understand that this change is coming and that there is nothing at all we can do to stop it. So I’m not beating a drum or a dead horse (or some other animal that sounds like a drum) to get this stopped. I think that both LL and the resident community will be in for a bit of a shock when our well-ingrained assumptions go out the window. Haha, I kid! LL isn’t aware of anything as far as I can tell.
I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere else, so I’ll do it here. What happens to in-world games that rely on the assumption of uniquely assigned names? I’m thinking specifically of (but the problem is not limited to) Tiny Empires, wherein our names are used as identifying (and unique) tokens. I realize that it isn’t Linden Lab’s responsibility to prevent script and game breakage in every instance, but it would seem some sensitivity on their part would be in order. Here comes this groundbreaking, assumption-wiping change that potentially break things like door locks, security systems and name-based games such as Tiny Empires and Bloodlines. What up, Linden Lab?
According to the LSL Wiki, there will be some new functions — llGetDisplayName() and llRequestUsername() –added to the language once (or before, I hope) Display Names are released on an unsuspecting world, but I fear this will mean my Tiny Empires title will read: “The Very Hungry whatcha.eaton.” Boo!
UPDATE 20100831 07:57 SLT: Tiny Empires creator Ultralite Soleil tells me that, using the current LSL functions, existing TE players will retain their current names but that new users (those who join SL after Display Names is enabled) will be named “Username Resident.” He added, “…which obviously sucks.” I would tend to agree.
