My identities
Who am I, really?
I have two identities: ChocolaMint and <REAL NAME HERE>. To get to the point, I do sincerely believe that ChocolaMint represents “me” more than my physical person does.
Inevitably, people learn about me through at least one of these two identities. They can be categorized into the following four categories:
- You might only know me physically, in which case you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog.
- You might know me physically, and then learned who I am as ChocolaMint.
- You learned about me online as ChocolaMint, and then met me “in real life”, per se.
- You only know about me as ChocolaMint.
- Please stay that way!
ChocolaMint as an identity is everything I chose to identify with. Who am I as a person, what I like, what I dislike, and my creative endeavors. <REAL NAME HERE>, however, carries baggage that I didn’t get to choose. Such things as age, sex, gender, race, nationality, etc. And unfortunately, in this world, those things affect how people treat you, whether intentionally or not. It’s a kind of survival instinct embedded in our DNA, to greedily sort people into generalized buckets as a way to “understand” people quickly. It’s a heuristic that’s worked consistently since the dawn of mankind, but one that’s slowly crumbled in the modern age. People dislike stereotypes, yet unconsciously lean towards them for people they don’t know.
And that’s the purpose of ChocolaMint as an identity. If you know me as ChocolaMint, you can learn about who I am without all the noise that comes with <REAL NAME HERE>. We can work together even if you have incredible prejudice towards a particular race, sex, or maybe an age group. And that’s ultimately what I really care about - making games with fantastic people, without these baggages getting in the way.
If you happen to know both ChocolaMint and <REAL NAME HERE>, the purpose of ChocolaMint does fall away, unfortunately. However, we would eventually part ways physically, and when that day comes, I’d like to ask you to forget about <REAL NAME HERE> gradually, and only contact me through the ChocolaMint identity. Maybe you’d be able to treat me like ChocolaMint once again.
If I ever get to the point where people have actual incentives to dox me… Well, it’s not like it’s impossible. I’m still a programmer after all. This is an area where you can’t really operate under a pseudonym if you want to get job offers, unlike artists. But do keep all this in mind, that when you dox me, you’re disrespecting ChocolaMint, and doing yourself a disservice.