Lens on What's In A Name?

Let's face it, Shakespeare was wrong.  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but if it was called "corpse flower" it sure as hell wouldn't have the same romantic associations.  This probably accounts for the historically sluggish Valentine's Day sales of Amorphophallus Titanum.

I've certainly seen my share of terrible names in MMOs over the years, and it's possible that Guild Wars 2 has the most bad names ever, simply by default, because all of the servers have a shared namespace.

But I'm not certain people who name their character 'X X Thor X X', 'V V V V V V V V V V', or 'xXx Drizzit xXx' are likely to come up with anything that isn't headshakingly stupid with an empty namespace to choose from.  Not to mention the names that are vulgar or racist.

By the way, those names above are ones I've seen in-game in GW2.

The only game(s) where the namespace is pretty much free are from Cryptic.  In "Champions Online" (and I believe in "Star Trek Online" as well), you can pick just about anything that doesn't violate the TOS (no copyright or trademark infringement, nothing vulger or racist, that sort of thing) because every name is associated with an account handle or nickname.  So if you've got a friend with a character named "Superduper Fellow" you might have to specify which "Superduper Fellow" you're trying to send a tell too, because there can be more than one.

It's not perfect, but it pretty much guarantees you get the name you want.

And names are important to players.

I was a little disappointed that two of my names were taken very, very quickly in GW2.  "Spongo" and "Borborygmus" were both already gone when I got around to trying to use them, the first about 20 minutes after the game launched.

But I got the name for my main, and we got our guild name as well, so that's a big plus.

But after playing these silly games for years, and seeing countless names that were jaw-droppingly bad, I've come to some conclusions about names...

SPELL IT RIGHT--Seriously, that's the single most important thing.  If your character or (especially) guild name is recognizeable, especially if it uses English words...spell it right.

The other day I happened to be doing an event in GW2 with three players from a guild and I clicked on one to see their guild name was "The Vangaurd".

Now I suppose it's possible that it's intentional, or ironic...but we all know it's just that whoever started the guild is an imbecile.  And everyone who joined should have said, "Yeah, I'll join, as soon as it's spelled right."

And I just had to check, so I Googled it...another server has a guild named "The Last Vangaurd".

I have no words...and they have no spellchecker

DON'T COPY THE OBVIOUS ONES--Somebody once did a search for how many variants on Legolas they could find amongst the elvish hunters in WoW.  Hundreds of 'em.

Every server in Lord of the Rings Online has a bajillion different variations on Legolas and Aragorn and other characters from the lore.

A number of my standard names are ripped off too, but I stole them from really obscure places.  And if somebody's taken 'em, I don't double up the letters in attempt to keep my "cool" name.

So don't go with Legollas, Legolaas, Leggolas, Legggolas, or, Eru help you, xXxLegolasxXx.

"Leggomyeggolas" I'm perfectly OK with.

DON'T CHOOSE SHORT-LIVED CULTURAL REFERENCES--It's really easy to make a joke name based on an Internet meme.  Cultural reference humor can be easy and sometimes even funny.  We all use it all the time...hell, I do it here sometimes.

But a name lasts, and you don't want to be trying to explain how funny your name used to be until everybody forgot about "that song that was always on the radio" or "that video clip that became a meme".

When I see those sorts of names, I am reminded of http://failblog.cheezburger.com/ugliesttattoos where you will see a never-ending array of short-lived cultural references permanently inked on people's bodies.  You can see a lot of Charlie Sheen "Winning!" tattoos there...who's going to get that joke in five years?  Who thinks it's funny now?  Lots and lots of bad-choice meme-based tattoos.

Oh, and a lot of misspellings too.

Here's a simple example of what can go wrong...

Today, Justin Bieber is a Really Big Deal(tm) with all the teenage girls.  Before him, it was the Jonas Brothers who you might not remember (if you're lucky).  Before them...yeah, I have no idea either.

Don't let your character or guild name have that fate.  Some cultural references can live on while others are so transient you'll be regretting your joke name in a month.

WATCH OUT FOR PRETENTIOUS--In GW2 we ended up on the informally official role-playing server because, generally, you have a less juvenile crowd on an RP server.  Yes, sometimes the RP stuff can be a bit...much...but better that than a server chock-full of adolescent asstards.

Combined with the RP server, given that the namespace is so full, a lot of people are using surnames and a lot of the surnames are descriptive.  These tend to be a bit of fantasy boilerplate, but given the namespace, I understand.  So on our server I'll give a pass to all but the most pretentious sounding name.

How do you know if your name is too pretentious sounding?  Certain words are a dead give-away.  I like to use them ironically, like with a pet named "Doomchicken" or a character surname of "Alebane".

Here's a hint...the pretentious words in those names weren't "ale" or "chicken".

Just ask yourself the question, "Does this name sound like the kind of thing a 12 year-old boy would name his character to sound cool?"

If the answer is yes...well, you have your answer.  Unless you _are_ a 12 year-old boy, in which case...awesome name dude!

THE THREE CHOICES FOR NAMING YOUR GUILD

Naming a guild is particularly difficult, as it has to be acceptable to everyone who's going to join up.  Generally, it can't be stupid, because nobody wants to be associated with something obviously asinine.  So I've narrowed the field to three types that can work...

SOMETHING COOL-SOUNDING--Often, these names will be lore based names.  It's an attempt to project an aura around the guild, and it's always a double-edged blade.  Because attempting to sound cool too often sounds pretentious.

Now a role-playing guild has every right to have a pretentious-sounding name.  But other than that, the guild members are likely to feel that other players are giggling at them.  And they'll probably be right.

I can give a perfect example...and it's from GW2, but it's not a player guild.  It's the "guild" that was made up of the main NPCs the players work with as they journey through their storyline quests, one from each of the five in-game races.  That group, or "guild" in the game lore, was called "Destiny's Edge".

Seriously..."Destiny's Edge".  You'd have to put in some work to come up with something more pretentious sounding that that.  In fact, it's so trite that every time one of the NPCs says it, I wince.  It's so goddamned "ooooooo, cool, fantasy, destiny, edge, oooooooo!" that it's laughable.

I myself, as a lifelong fantasy fanboy, feel the temptation sometimes to go with "cool sounding".  But it's a tough line to walk.  I've used the guild name "The Council of Ashes" in a few games, but I've always been concerned that it was both generic and pretentious, thereby failing on two counts.

It's a fine, fine line.

SOMETHING FUNNY--As long as you're not using one of those short-lived cultural reference I talked about above, a funny name can work out too.  But humor, like cool, is in the mind of the beholder.  Beminder.  Whatever.

Again, because everybody in the guild is going to have to wear the tag, it's a balancing act.  Everybody in the guild is going to have to find it funny or at least inoffensive.  And they're all going to have to be willing to wear a guild tag that's a joke.  And some people aren't comfortable projecting the "we're a joke" vibe.

Lore-based humor can work if it's well-crafted.  I have an alt in LoTRO in an alt-guild named "Isengard Bids Five", a direct (and funny) reference to a epic storyline quest in the "Rise of Isengard" expansion.  I thought the name was inspired and joined up.  Hell, I wished I'd come up with the name.

But it doesn't have to be lore-based at all...the other night in GW2 I saw a guild named "We Never Finish Anyth".  I actually laughed out loud.  And as long as everyone in the guild is comfortable wearing that, more power too them

But too many joke names are, well, just jokes.  Not funny, not inspired.  And the only bad joke is one that's not funny.

Of course, it might still violate the TOS, but if it's funny, at least it's not a bad joke!

As an aside, you can combo these first two...  Everything in Latin is cool-sounding (and pretentious), so you can put something silly in Latin and get a twofer!  One of my old guilds was the "Deadly Hedgehogs".  Goofy, but in Latin it sounded pretty awesome.

SOMETHING NEUTRAL--My standard fallback position.  I want a guild name that all of my guildies find acceptable.  Getting something they all love isn't likely to happen, but by taking something relatively safe you can at least avoid conflict.

Removing a potential source of drama from a guild is always a great, big, fat plus in my book.  Because if people can find something to quarrel over, they will, and that becomes more true as the guild grows in size.

Let me give you the perfect example in the name I came up with for our SW:TOR guild, "The Anchorhead Irregulars".

Why Anchorhead?  Because in the Star Wars universe that most of us are aware of, the movies, and in the previous Star Wars MMO "Star Wars Galaxies", Anchorhead was the most insignificant flyspeck of a settlement.  But it's one all the players would recognize as it got a prominent mention or two in the first movie.

That it turned out in the SWTOR universe to be the main starport for the Republic side and we were a Republic guild was a bonus.

Why Irregulars?  Threefold.  First, we're kind of a weird, heterogenous group, hence not regular.  Second, it's a common military descriptor for an ad hoc group of soldiers, fighting, say, against the Empire.  Third, it summons up, for those literarily inclined, images of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of street urchins Sherlock Holmes used to use to aid him in his cases.

So "The Anchorhead Irregulars" was perfect...it was neutral, it had lore resonances and multiple rationales.  It wasn't funny or cool sounding, but it definitely worked.  I think everyone even liked it.

IN CONCLUSION

Gamers are weird.  MMO gamers are weirder.  Many things have great importance to us that we would have a difficult time explaining (let alone justifying) to non-gamers.

But the importance of many of these things springs from the amount of time and effort we can put into these games.  I can't even begin to guess the number of /played hours some people have put into WoW or EQ.  Or how much time some people have managed across a number of games.  Tens of thousands of hours in some cases, I imagine (as a point of reference, 10,000 hours would be about 5 years of standard workdays).

And the first thing people see about us in our virtual existance is a name.  We grow attached to it and, in some cases, it becomes attached to us.  People get to know the person behind a given name...it really does become an altar ego.

It's natural that, over time, we would place great value on a name.  On our name.

Because a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but nobody wants a dozen "xXx Drizzit xXx"s for Valentine's Day.