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That might depend on the legal environment. Right now, if I log on to a MUD and lie my ass off about who I am, it's the MUD's problem. If the MUD bans me and I devise a workaround, it's the MUD's problem. However, if I was using someone else's SSN (especially without their consent), I might be committing an offense that the legal system would care about. This is particularly true if the persistent ID had a much broader reach than the entertainment community. For example, if the system was used to validate your identity at government web sites, etc. It's analogous to why ****ing around with the US mail system is a bad idea.
This would amount to a virtual ban on foreign players without some sort of workaround, however, which would be bad for many MUDs.
Another difference with a government ID-based plan would be that many potential gamers are minors who may not have access to credit cards, driver's licenses, or other commonly-employed means of "adult" identification.
Right now, our primary weapon against grief players is that it can often take them hours to do what we can undo in a couple commands (delete their character, ban their ISP). But you occasionally find "special" players who will spend all day being a nuisance, and it's a waste of administrative resources to even spend the few minutes it takes to deal with them.
A reasonable solution that didn't sacrifice an individual's privacy (for example, some form of encrypted third-party verification service, so the MUD never sees your personal data) would do for online gaming what Caller ID and reverse-lookup did to prank calling.
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