Meet My Twins: Dante And Nero February 20, 2008
Posted by shoinan in Non-Gaming, RPG.trackback
This article is in response to ‘Playing Godparent‘ by Margaret Robertson, videogame writer and consultant, and former editor of Edge. She asks if “gamers are better or worse at naming their kids than normal people?”
Margaret rightly points out something I’d not considered; gamers have more experience with naming things than your average Tom, Dick or Harry. I can’t even remember all the times I’ve had to coin a moniker for a game character just this year, let alone in my entire life. However I can recall naming ‘Link’ for Phantom Hourglass, since I’m a sad Zelda purist too.
She also suggests several systems gamers use for naming characters, such as friends and family (how I named my characters for the original Final Fantasy) and sticking with defaults (all other Final Fantasy games). She did forget one system though; naming after yourself. Maybe this makes me a self-centered egomaniac but I always enjoyed seeing a message like ‘Only you can stop the evil wizard, SINAN!’ or ‘You’re the greatest, SINAN’. In fairness, I grew out of that phase pretty quickly (yeah right).
Lastly Margaret discusses how getting a name wrong can be destructive and this particularly applies to my experiences with World of Warcraft. Often a level 20 or so character will get deleted despite hours upon hours of labour just because I’ve grown weary of their crappy name. However, it’s difficult to come up with a half-decent name in WoW because all the good ones are taken (what with over 10 million people playing the damn thing), so you have to be overly inventive when christening your hero-to-be. Thus awful names like ‘Xylarisia’ and ‘Zyndethogar’ show up all the time - you might as well just be hitting keys randomly on the character creation screen. Still, they’re all better than bilge like ‘Fraginator’ or ‘Iamthekingofnoobs’; if the intention of that player is to ensure I ignore them forever then those names do their job.
So onto her question: Are gamers “better or worse at naming their kids than normal people?” Well first off she rightly points out that gamers aren’t normal and secondly her question implies that there are gamers out there who have found a man or woman to love them despite their terrible affliction. That’s touching, if slightly unbelievable.
Jokes and stereotypes aside, I think gamers are likely to be worse. Most gamers live in a world of character names that simply wouldn’t work in the real world, like ‘Link’, ‘Snake’, ‘Squirtle’ and ‘Sonic’. We all accept those names without thinking, such is the detachment of a videogame. So in a time when more and more parents simply don’t think of their child when christening them, it would be worrying if inspiration were to be derived from such a diverse pool of unusual and over-the-top names. I remember reading one forum thread about a guy who had named his child ‘Tiger Zebedee Pikachu’. I kid you not. God, I bet there’s some poor kid out there called ‘Cloud’ with a sister called ‘Tifa’, and that’s wrong on so many levels.
For the record, my kids will have pretty standard names, since they’re already going to have enough crap at school for any facial features they’ve unwittingly inherited from good old Dad.
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All interesting points, but an issue like this varies from gamer to gamer. I must confess I can be quite unimaginative in naming characters. If there’s a name generator, such as the ones found in Neverwinter Nights or KOTOR, I’ll use it, as the names these systems produced is generally much better than anything I can come up with and more in keeping with the game’s universe - something i find particularly important in RPGs.
In the absence of this, I use the same one or two names I’ve used in most games: either Jolku, the main character from a Zelda short story I wrote, or Jupath, my WoW name. The former didn’t even come to me in a bout of creative inspiration - I simply hit the keyboard (literally) and shuffled some letters. The latter was my attempt at being clever - JUst PAssing THrough seemed quite funny for a character on a 10-day trial.
And yet, these aren’t good names. They don’t feel right. There’s no describable or tangible reason WHY these names feel wrong, you just know they do. So based on the only two names i have ever created through video games, my kids are screwed!
It’s quite depressing, as I write in my spare time, and I struggle to come up with names for characters there. Naming is an art form that some gamers seem to be able to tap into, and if you’re one of them, you should be thankful.