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There's a good article in currently about the potential of persistent online identities. The problem, as we're all aware, is that people can hide behind non-persistent online identities and act like general jackasses, with no reprecussions. There are a number of potentially pending solutions (including those from IBM and Microsoft) that aim to ensure that someone's online identity remains constant rather than tying someone's online identity to his/her physical world identity.
How does this impact MUDs? How useful would it be to be able to track a players' behavior across MUDs or even within MUDs that contain the ability to create characters without providing relatively unique identifying information like a credit card? Dealing with grief players and those players who engage in financial fraud would immediately become MUCH easier.
I used to be all about anonymity on the internet, but over time, I've come to realize that it's quite important to be able to maintain and verify a persistent identify, even if it's not tied to your physical-world persona. For instance, look at Kavir. His real name is, obviously, not Kavir, and the identity is tied to his real identity only because he's let his real name be known. At the same time though, does it matter that his real identity is not immediately identifiable? I'd say it doesn't, as long as one can be reasonably certain that if one encounters "Kavir" one is encountering the same person, and not multiple people attempting to impersonate someone in particular.
China is actually at the forefront of this insofar as they've recently started a government-funded project to tie online identities to offline identities in order to allow online games companies to fulfill the mandate that their games start tapering off rewards for gameplay after X number of hours within a single day (in an attempt to stop habitual playing).
--matt
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