Speaking of Identity Verification – Shanda subsidiary Aurora Technology has frozen the accounts of any male players who play female characters in-game in their MMORPG King of the World. Pacific Epoch reports that "Aurora stipulates that only female gamers can play female characters in the game, and it requires gamers who chose female characters to prove their biological sex with a webcam,"

Identity checks via webcam? Not exactly hard to fake, if you have a handy female relative or neighbour around the joint. Okay, actually, trivial to fake. But imagine if Linden Lab implemented this policy. Just think of the blog comments.

Notably, there seems to be no mention of any effort to prevent female users running male characters. Now that seems a bit discriminatory and biased, if you ask me.

[via boingboing.net]