A few days ago, between January 23rd to the 25th, was 2025’s Global Game Jam. To those who don’t know, Game Jams are themed events where multiple artists, programmers, game designers, and various other professions make small teams and try to pump out a prototype of a functional game within some alloted timespan. This specific jam was 48 hours long and themed around “bubbles”; whatever idea you had that was vaguely related to bubbles was fair game. Me and a couple of friends from my game design degree decided we’d participate and managed to crank out a fairly cute if cookie-cutter shop management game where you serve boba tea to thirsty aliens.

It was our first game jam so we didn’t expect to pump out a groundbreaking piece of media, and honestly I’m pretty proud of what we managed to make. It’s cute, charming, and decently fun even if it gets old quick. Now I’d love to give you all a link to it so I could get opinions on how shit it truly is, but I feel like I shouldn’t, because it has my real name attached to it.

We made the game by collaborating on a github repository that I was hosting on my own account (it has a student program so it has github pro and a few other bells and whistles), so I felt it was only appropriate to also put the finished game on my itch.io account. What I didn’t account for was that later on two of my teammates would put everyone’s full name on the README.md file of the github page, and also post about it to their linkedin pages and instagram. I understand why they did it, all of their accounts were variations on their actual name anyways, but for me whose username is an overwatch reference and whose icon is a frog wearing a dunce hat, this was a bit of a shock. I’ve shown people in real life my blog, sure, but any connections between my online persona and my real self were one-sided, private, and ephermal. I did not connect the two anywhere that would stick around for more than a day.

Growing up, I was told that separating your online self from your real self was basic internet security: never use your real name, don’t say your age, the appropriate response to “ASL?”¹ is closing the chat window, that sort of thing. Nowadays it seems like the traditional wisdom has shifted to the complete opposite, with some online spaces indicating that not including your age in your bio is a sign of untrustworthyness. You are expected to tell everyone your name, sex, and location before they even ask you!

This is without even getting into the fact that you’re expected to “build your brand” by HR teams across the globe. You are assumed and expected to make every hobby of yours, every activity you ever do, into something to further your career. Post about your wedding on LinkedIn and use it to talk about the stock market! Include a link to your personal website and github on this application form! Let me look into your room and sniff the closet to see if you use the Brand Approved smell of detergent! I’ve complained about this before, but the sheer amount of bullshit that people sincerely expect me to put in my employer’s hands is staggering.

I’ve tried for years to keep this distance between my internet persona of Lucio and who I actually am as reasonably distant as I can. If I mention something that has happened to me IRL in a post, I replace names, add small misdirections if needed, and make sure it can’t be traced back to me. I only show my face to people I trust enough to not misuse it, and I only show my online persona to friends I’ve known for a while. But it’s been hard to keep this going when I tell people that I do this and their response was some flavor of confusion or apprehension. A university career teacher did not understand the concept of having online accounts with a name that was not my own until I repeated it a few times.

And now there’s a permanent tether between the two. Other than nuking a game other people worked on, which I really don’t wanna do, there is a handful of social media posts that entangle these two personas into one now.

So do I even bother anymore?

Breaking this wall might help me in terms of finding a job, or just by not having to worry as much about what I do and don’t say. But there’s so many things I want to be able to say without having it permanently attached to my face and legal name; I don’t want my boss to know my Interesting Opinions^TM regarding capital and CEOs, or even the memes I make about JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure for fun. I want to be able to have fun without it being a fucking commodity!

So what do I do now? I don’t know, I really don’t. Posting this at all is probably a bad idea because now any malicious actor crawling through my blog knows they have a line to pull on, but I’m not worried about that, honestly. I have nothing to be ashamed of in my real life, so it’s not a question of needing the mask, it’s the question that I want the choice to be able to put it on. Online I get some sort of escape from the dredges of the real world. It’s as much as an escape as a movie, book, or game, and because the web is interactive I can’t interact with it as much if every word I write has a cost.

For now I think I’ll just keep typing, being myself, and hoping it doesn’t bite me in the ass later. But despite my morals, it’s getting harder and harder to not fill in that “Github URL” section of the resume when I haven’t found a new job in half a year.

We’ll see.