Recently, Blizzard entertainment announced plans to make real names mandatory on their Starcraft 2 forums, with other forums like World of Warcraft to follow. This was met with a wide array of opinions, both positive and negative. While I’m in the positive camp, I know many, many people who prefer pseudonyms over their real names when online. Well, giving into an overwhelmingly negative response, Blizzard has rescinded this rule today, allowing people to hide behind their pseudonyms at their leisure. Now, as someone who uses my real name on everything I do online, I personally don’t understand the big deal, but I seem to be in the minority.

I personally see pseudonyms as something to hide behind, rather than something to be proud of. However, I know many, many people who will only use pseudonyms online (and hell, some who use them in real life) and I just personally don’t get it. I can see using a pseudonym in terms of, like, a callsign within a video game, like the way pilots and so on use them in the military. However, I don’t get why one would use them exclusively on forums, social networking sites, and so on. So I wanted to ask y’all…if you use a pseudonym, online or otherwise…why? Is it a privacy thing? Is it an identity thing? Is it just a cool name you like to use? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading!