Yesterday, on twitter, I started a small twitter poll, curious to find out if my policy of keeping my World of Warcraft life separate from my offline life was a common occurrence. It was fun to hear from a few folks about the real life meetups they’ve had with guildies, and how they’d gotten to know players better thanks to being Facebook friends. And still others replied that of course they did, as they didn’t have anything to hide.
That latter comment stuck with me for a bit to ponder. Do guildies whom I’ve politely refused to RealID friend or to share my Facebook info with feel I must have something to hide? I hope not, since that’s pretty far from the reason why I don’t overlap, except in a tiny number of cases, my gaming life with the rest of my life.
You see, I like to log in to WoW and submerge myself as Anexxia the shadow priest, or Psychocandy the Boomkin. Someone calling me by my real name drags me out of the magical World of Warcraft, and puts back smack dab into every day me. Everyday me works as a digital marketer and manages content, and slogs around a cold and rainy city on transit each day to get to and from work.
Further, even my friends who game (and they are a minority) primarily play console games and have little or no interest in hearing about my WoW adventures, much like the people who unfollow me on twitter after I post about food or some sort of RL event didn’t have interest in hearing about things outside of Warcraft from me.
One-on-one, I will talk to guildies and my warcraft buddies about all sorts of RL stuff. But please don’t be offended that I don’t FB friend you. You’d just be annoyed by all the social gaming SPAM and baby animal pictures anyhow…
🙂
This is the point at which I must disclose that I have met a small handfull of guildies IRL over the years. They know my everyday name, have met our crazy cats, and I would friend them on Facebook in a heartbeat if only they used Facebook. But those folks have transcended being my gaming friends — they are, blessedly, just friends at this point, with whom I’d be just as likely to talk about something tasty I baked as some awesome WoW achievement.
How about you? Are your Warcraft worlds and your Facebook worlds combined?
I am facebook friends with my fellow officers and some people from former guilds so we can keep in touch. It isn’t something I give to everyone, facebook contains more personal stuff and is about my family, so I tend to keep m y friends list there smaller. If guildies and gaming people want to keep up with me, that it typically what twitter is for.
Ditto– I always encourage guildies to join twitter if they haven’t been regular users, and always create a separate list to make sure I keep up with them more easily. I definitely feel twitter has been a key way I’ve gotten to know WoW folks a lot better.
I’m on Facebook, though I never use the thing.
Most of what I find on Facebook equates to spam in one form or another, and I find Twitter much more useful for the random updates of whatever happens to be going on with my life at the moment.
I do have several guildies that I’ve friended on Facebook; fellow officers and regular members. But, since I never post anything there it’s sort of like a dark, empty forum where people occasionally say something to me, I read it, and then I go back to watching my twitter stream.
So I guess I kind of keep them separate and don’t at the same time. I don’t post my own WoW stuff (or anything else for that matter) on FB, but I do friend gaming people on there to see what they have to say.
I do mix the two on twitter, though. I’ve tried to keep them separate, but I find I always neglect the normal me in favor of the gaming me, so now I just use one account again. I don’t bother keeping track of who unfollows me beyond seeing the follow notifications from the same person a half dozen times over the years which sort of gives them away. If non-gamers don’t want to see me tweet about games, they’re free to go follow someone else.
I used to unfollow anybody who didn’t talk about WoW, or who actively talked against it. These days I don’t really care what people talk about unless they’re obsessively tweeting about something I have no interest in, tweet about politics often, or feel the need to bash something I like or believe in. I’ve become much more tolerant in that regard, and hopefully other people will as well.
My Warcraft and FB worlds are combined. To be honest, I didn’t plan it that way, but it just sort of happened. I met a couple of people through the game, and lost touch with them. We were able to find each other through Facebook.
My guild actually has a Facebook group, which I am an admin of. Soooo yea. It sort of just happened XD
As far as FB, I’m FB friends with exactly three WoW people, and they’re people I’d be FB friends whether WoW existed or not.
Twitter is the one that vexes me. I only have one Twitter account, and I tweet about WoW, local stuff, daily comings and goings, and the big one…politics. I’ve been on the receiving end of some open hostility from WoW people who hate people who think/talk/tweet about politics, and I’ve even been unfollowed over it…and it hurts. By the same token, I’m sure there are RL people who are sick and tired of me tweeting about WoW. I have yet to start a separate Twitter account for my WoW life, but the thought has crossed my mind…
I’m Facebook friends with a lot of my guildmates, but I also know all of them in real life, so there’s a big overlap there.
That said, I would have no problem with adding the guildmates I don’t actually know in person to Facebook either.
I keep everything SO separate. Separate email address for the real-me and the game-me. I even have a separate email address for EACH game that I play. Why? I want to be able to casually tell someone my email address, or sign up for forums, or comment on a blog etc, and not have people find mah real name. Maybe I’m paranoid, but if they don’t need it anyway, why should I just be handing it out?
Now, the facebook me is pretty bare bones. People actually perceive it as weird to NOT have a facebook page. So I have one. It’s very boring. I don’t use it. But if a prospective employer wants to find me, for example, it will not help or hurt my chances. The murlocs have a facebook fan page, only because I thought people might want to subscribe that way (since a lot of people like to get twitter updates.) Only a handful of people follow the blog on facebook, so that was largely useless.
I only use twitter for bloggy stuff for the murlocs, so I don’t worry about mixing because I don’t have any RL friends wandering about there. If I wanted to communicate with RL friends, I wouldn’t use twitter because they’re just not into it.
That was long and rambly. TL;DR: Separated like the laundry. Totally.
I have a FB page, but I rarely ever use it, so not sure if it counts. There are a few people on there from my guild, of which only one I’ve never met in real life (and he doesn’t actually use his account either, so I guess that works out!).
Most of the friends I have on FB who play WoW I met before WoW or were RL friends of my brother (who got me into WoW). I don’t see myself actively adding guild members to FB to be fair, partly because I don’t use it and partly because I don’t necessarily want them reading any updates I might possibly put there (the few times a year I logon).
I do like having my WoW life and RL fairly separate. With the exception of the people on WoW that aren’t so much WoW friends as just friends 🙂
I have a few WoW friends on facebook, but after one instance where I realized my healing lead was actually an incredibly awful person I now add in-games under a special privilege-locked fbook profile, and upgrade them after I can verify they are not d-bags. The people who get upgraded are also those I would (and have!) meet IRL and have exchanged other out of game information with.
The only WoW friends I have on FB I “knew” (mainly via LJ) before I started playing. I can’t think that there’s anyone that I met in-game who is also a FB friend.
I remember going through a phase where I unfollowed people who talked endlessly about Rift, but I got over that eventually. I still do unfollow people whose twitter feed is primarily achievement spam though. #donotwant
It is interesting to see that many guilds have been creating Facebook pages or groups. An interesting alternative to guild forums.
I started with one twitter account but the chasm between my gaming peeps and my non-gaming peeps was vexing enough that I very quickly had separated them out into different streams. The WoW folks didn’t want to hear about any of the evil marketing I do for a living, and I even got some unfollows from sharing recipes!
I do have a couple of folks I have not met IRL in my FB feed. Theyy’re folks I’ve known fro LJ and other blogs/communities for the past decade plus. SO although I haven’t ever sat across a table from them, they’re people who feel right to have amongst those every day RL friends.
Having separate email addresses for separate gaming accounts makes it *so* much easier to detect phishing emails too!
I like to think I have saved myself some drama by keeping them separate. I have yet to have any drama or big blowouts with any RL friends via Facebook. I can not say the same of WoW guildies…
🙂
That sounds like a good way to manage them in. And to avoid the dramas.
I can’t stand achievement spammers, no matter which game they’re playing.
I still unfollow people who talk about Rift all day long. I’m not interested, so there’s no reason for me to follow. If they talk about it on occasion, no problem. If they constantly talk about Rift vs WoW, they get unfollowed too. I have to at least care a little bit about what you’re saying for me to keep following.
I actually abandoned an email account and created a new one because it was SO bombarded with phishing spam that I would miss legitimate emails from Blizzard.