Electronic Arts has just backed into an interesting twist to the TOS story. They are linking your online terms of service to the physical video games you buy — if you violate their online TOS, your right to run every video game linked to that account will be revoked.
This adds a massive lightning stroke of accountability into the affair, doesn’t it? Suddenly, the forums aren’t just a “value-add”, they are also a potential “value-take-away”. I have this picture in my head of Family Member A explaining to Family Members B and C how A lost his/her temper in the EA forums last night, and now the whole family has lost not only their access to their games, but possibly their game statistics & reputations too, depending on what EA does to enforce the ban and the subsequent serial number invalidation. Ah, it all comes back to Identity mgmt and asset mgmt, doesn’t it?
I suppose you could consider this the Real-time Blackhole List approach to reputation & social networking.
