One of the best parts of gaming is feeling like you can escape your little slice of reality. You can fall into a world that lets you destroy your enemies, cooperate with people you’ve never met, and show your ability to own other players. You can focus on destroying your old high scores, massacre hordes of zombies, or eliminate small populations of enemies with powerful weapons and abilities that you wish you could use in real life. Your imagination can make you a warlord, a rogue, or a powerful wizard— and Google wants to help you feel this immersion.
Soon, Benjamin Frenkel, the product manager at Google Play Games promises an upgrade to Google Play that gives you the ability to create unique Gamer IDs that take away the sting of using your real name to crawl up the leaderboards. Finally, users get to be who they want to be, customizing their display images, as well as their names to create a completely new identity.
It’s going to be easy:
- Log into a game
- Choose your gaming account
- Set your gamer ID and picture
- Start Playing!
If you’ve never used Google Play Games (which is pretty much impossible unless you’ve never played a mobile smartphone game or game for a tablet) you’ll first sign in, and give yourself one of 40 or more gamer avatars. Then you choose whether your profile is public or private, and if other gamers can associate themselves with you. All Gamer IDs have to be unique, so if you’ve got one all figured out it’s time to go claim it right now through the Google Play Games app.
Get ready for a faster, easier experience when you’re playing games. You can sign in automatically (once per account) rather than in games themselves. You can destroy your enemies as your majestic and stoic gamer identity, and get international acclaim for your pursuits. Hopefully, one of these days you’re as acclaimed as YouTube sensations Mystik, Mew2King, or even PewDiePie.
Here’s a link to the help center article that Google posted about this topic.