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Friday, May 24, 2013

What's Your Name?


Whenever a game lets me name a character, I get a bit excited. In my years of gaming, I've always gone through phases in name selection, rather than choosing the same name every time. I have some friends who will use the same name, or a variation of it, for years and never grow tired of it. But you know me, I like my variety!

As a kid I'd name my profiles and characters Ray, or sometimes a random name I thought was cool. Super boring, right? But I wanted to be in the game, so there was that.

As I hit my early teen years I started doing goofy stuff. I don't remember specific ones, but bodily functions (and I'm sure bits of anatomy) were heavily featured. Fortunately I matured pretty quickly, so I only marred a few games with that nonsense.

In my teen years I discovered a limitless supply of fantasy novels, and my mother's unwavering willingness to buy me any book I'd read. Teen fiction being what it is, many names I discovered were over the top or painfully cheesy. Names like John Strongman or Drake Bloodfang made me reel back in my seat and shout "oh man, that's awesome!" Or groovy or whatever kids said in the late 90s. Sadly, despite spending years in college taking many literature and writing courses, these sorts of names still creep in to my games. "Crow," my name for assassin-like characters, has still stuck with me after all these years. What can I say, the movie was weird and the name was cool. To this day I'm still a sucker for any art featuring a black bird.

When the original Lord of the Rings released I dug out my old LOTR trilogy and started working through them. I found myself really loving the naming conventions of Dwarves. And as time went on and I discovered the Warcraft universe, I continued my love of Dwarves. At some point I'd designed a dwarf for D&D or a story I was writing and named him Thoradin Doomshield, and like Crow that name has stuck with me for years and has become my first choice in naming any heavy armor, shield-wielding character I create.

In my later teens I jumped on the bandwagon of using foreign, and especially Eastern, words for everything. I went to Japan when I was 10 so I always felt a slight affinity for the Japanese culture and language, so I started using English to Japanese dictionaries and using those as names. I still have my WoW characters Kankyo (secluded life) and Mikiri (forsaken) on my account from years ago. I've since abandoned that naming convention since it confused the heck out of people, but it did spawn some of my favorite character names.

At one point I inexplicably went through a phase of naming every online character Face_____. It was due in part to my inability to play just one character, and thus people could just call me "Face," but I stuck with this for quite awhile. It affected my Xbox Live name, several forum names, a host of WoW characters, and I even painted it on a coffee mug! My usual one was Face_Stabbity, and while the name itself is a bit immature I still love it. I never use it for character names anymore, but a lot of my current online friends still call me Stabbity instead of my real name, so I guess it's the one that finally stuck.

Lately, for as few games as I'm able to play, I've been trying to stick to a "doom" motif. As I said my paladin is Doomshield, my troll mage is named Voodoom, I made an IKRPG character with the nickname Doomshot... pretty cheesy and I've grown tired of them, but I'm not sure where to go next. The problem with many of my names is that they're often taken, so I'm still waiting to find that one name that I can use universally, and that won't sound utterly ridiculous.

What about you guys? How do you name characters for video games, RPGs, web forums, etc? Do you stick to one name or theme, or do you just name them whatever the heck you want?

See you tomorrow!



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2 comments:

  1. Doulos, which is Koine Greek for servant/slave. It is a reminder to me of whom I serve even when playing a video game.

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  2. I really don't recall naming any characters until I started playing Everquest back in the day.

    I was stricken with finding a name that wasn't taken so I ended up just going with the random name generator to name my female Dark Elf Mage. It ended up giving me Kanenya. So began many many many many many hours of playing that game. They allowed last names eventually and then the PUNishment began. Mages in that game could summon their own food, bags, pet gear to make them stronger and all sorts of stuff so of course her name ended up as Kanenya Kansummon.

    My friend and I started 2-boxing EQ so I made a cleric to be our healer. I named him Doktor Feelgud. That cleric didn't work out for our needs so I made a Shadow Knight tank for our group and named him Nookem. Sir names came along and he ended up as Duke Nookem Kuzicant.

    Then we were playing Tribes 2 an FPS. I was using some very random name for a short time before my friend and I got pulled into a Tribe to play competitively. The name of our tribe was the Insane Asylum and we were suppose to pick a name of something that would be in an asylum. Our team members were The Warden, Psycopath, Straightjacket, so I became Shocktherapy. I was shocktherapy until our tribe was picked up by a larger tribe Drats. Still I was shocktherapy until one day one our tribe members started calling me Socktherapy and I ended up being called "Sock" for the rest of our Tribes 2 venture.

    Back to EQ with the same characters and we got sucked into the black whole that is WoW.

    In the early days of WoW I recalled the need for a tank and healer from EQ and so my friend and I started them. (Of course we played Hordes on a PVP server, Arthas, because only newbs and children played alliance.) :) My friend stayed true to Tribes and made a undead priest named Psycopath. My brother and I were going to both play Tauren warriors so we could 2 - tank things if need be in later content and so began my days as Tweedledum and my brother as Tweedledee.

    I had a Tauren shaman alt I named Blackmane but that was fairly unoriginal and lame.

    Then I went to college and met a guy who is in our current WMH gaming group who started calling me Fritzkrieg.

    Then I started back into wow and became the Tauren Druid Fritzkrieg.

    Almost all characters since then have been named some random spelling variant of Fritzkrieg.

    That is the evolution of my video game name! (WHEEEWWWWWWWW That was long)

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