[MUSIC] My name Jill MacKay and I'm a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. I'm also an avid video gamer. When I'm thinking about my digital footprint, I need to include not just things like social media but also who I am in the world of gaming. Like many people my age, I grew up with video games. My first games were Hudson Hawk on the Atari 1024 and Prince of Persia on the Macintosh Classic. I have pretty wide and varied tastes. I've played shooters like GoldenEye, 007, and Shadows of the Empire but also point and click adventure games like Broken Sword. I absolutely love gaming. And I've met some amazing people through this whole beat who I would consider to be some of my best friends. I've flown to America to meet people and to play games with them and hang out at gaming conventions. And I wouldn't change any of it. But all of this fun does come with a caveat. There's a part of my digital footprint that still remembers what I was like when I was a 16 year old geek, hanging out with a bunch of other geeks. And that part of my digital footprint is extremely hard to manage. My identity is all over gaming forums and gaming websites. Sites that are privately owned and controlled. Sites that I can't delete my data from. That part of my digital footprint is massive, and it's very exposed. A lot of my growing up happened online. Think about the kind of person that you were when you were 16, and think about that person trying to impress new friends, possibly by saying things that they might not really mean. At that time I thought I was going to be an author or possibly a superhero. So, I wasn't particularly thinking about how anything I said might reflect on me when I was 30. Or even in another 20 years when I'm 50. And my new career career goal is to be a fancy professor or possibly a superhero. I have some gaming friends who use multiple Facebook accounts to try and keep their friends from one world from crossing over into the next world. And I have some friends who have said that they later realized what an idiot they were when they were a teenage boy hanging out on the internet, thinking that they would never have to answer for what they were saying. The thing is, is that there's still good people. There are people that I trust, but an out of context snapshot of that can really give somebody the wrong impression of who they are. For awhile, I was very cautious about my gaming persona and I tried to limit the connections between my gaming identity and what I thought might be a more presentable online persona. But that felt fake to me. When I finished my PhD, I found myself writing lots of CVs, as you do, and I was talking about gaming as a hobby and even mentioning some of the skills that this hobby has given me, my gaming identity is part of me. My friends are a part of me and my teenage years are a part of me, I don't think that I did anything wrong when I was a teenager. Maybe just a little bit embarrassing. And so you might say that for me anyway being a gamer and being open about being a gamer is part of my authentic self. I will always be the kind of person who gets excited about video games and books or week of annual leave to play Mass Effect 3 through it at its launch date. Strangely enough I think the best parallel to my gaming identity is my political identity. I've got strong political beliefs and I don't that think it's right for me to pretend that those beliefs don't exist. They may have changed and mellowed as I have gotten older but they're still a part of me. While I wouldn't necessarily open an interview with my political beliefs or my gaming history, I would be happy to own up to both of them. Regardless of how you decide you're going to integrate your online identities, whether you're like my friend who has these two different personas to keep those sides of their life separate, or you're like my other friends who comment on forums with their real names. And some of them have been doing this for over 20 years. I think that the thing to do is to identify how far your digital footprint goes. And to make sure that it doesn't get away from you. You don't want to be surprised by something that's lurking out there. I've grown up as a gamer, and I think I'm maybe in the first generation who's going to be taking an online identity like mine into a professional world, that thinks that it has the right to Google you. Therefore, my personal belief is that we all just need to be a little bit more open about it. Just so long as you understand what your digital footprint really looks like. [MUSIC]
