What’s In a Name?
The Challenge of Nomenclature
By Dave McLean - April 6th, 2010
I used to take character names so seriously when I was a kid. Generally, I cribbed them from my favourite movies and books—Raistlin, Gimli, Madmartigan, Khan, Roland—but there were a few made-up names that found their way into heavy rotation. Like Thon Malus; that was my go-to name for close to a decade. I’m not sure how it came to me exactly, I only know that I used it so often and so consistently that twenty or so years later, when one of my childhood friends met my son for the first time, he said, “So, I guess this must be little Thon…”
But then all that earnest naming stopped. Some time over the last twenty years, I became weirdly self-conscious about my gaming names. With no good reason—online, multiplayer gaming amounts to about one percent of all the gaming I do. Nobody’s watching. But rather than pick genre-appropriate names or even just cool names, my characters get called Bort, or Dingus, or Abe Vigoda. If the character has a sword, I usually name them Stabbidy; if they have a gun, it’s Shooty. If there are a trio of characters, I invariably call them Billy, Shecky, and Poo. And if I know my character’s name will be used as part of the in-game dialogue, I always use “you Butthole” so I can look forward to hearing things like, “Hey, you Butthole, follow me!” and “Avenge my death, you Butthole!”
So I’ve given up earnestness for irony. I offer no judgment on this, it’s just a phenomenon I’ve noticed and I thought I’d point it out. What about you? What names do you use these days and has it changed over the years?
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My RPG career essentially started with Pokemon Red and Blue, and so at first I just renamed all my Pokemon to their same names, except in upper and lower case letters as opposed to the all-upper case letters the game gives you. Later on, I renamed them after cartoon characters, and even later I started naming them after political figures (Kai-Shek, my Infernape, is a badass–though don’t mention that to Zedong, my Vileplume). Now I tend to name them after favorite characters in literature.
I thought Gatsby, my Totodile, would feel bad about being replaced by a Smoochum, so I named her Myrtle. I thought he’d like that.
I think my favourite name that you have used is from Jedi Academy: NotTronGuy.
Awesome.
I generally just use “PsychoDuck” for most online games, and my actual first name for more “personal” titles such as Animal Crossing. Of course, there’s also times when I just go a little nuts with my naming, randomly changing my Steam name to things like “Pocket Pickle: Boy Wonder” and “Hank ‘PsychoDuck’ Hill” (The latter accompanied with spamming Hank Hill voice clips via mic).
The wife and I are totally drained of imagination so we have started to leverage the kids ability to make up names on the fly. My Dragon Age wizard is Razzaplazz and her WOW character is Niogi. He works for cheap if anyone is really stuck for something and produces relatively decent names in 5 seconds or less.
I haven’t online-gamed in ages, but I’d usually go with something totally teenage girly, like TigerLily or Saffron. Nowadays, I save my naming-fu (or what’s left of it) for my houseplants: I have an ivy named Newton Pulsifier the Sixth, a jade plant named Ming the Merciless But Not Quite Upright (it leans over a lot), and a orchid cactus named Phil.