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!



Remember to follow me on Facebook. I'm doing a blog post every single day for 2013, and Facebook is a great way to stay up-to-date as well as take part in my monthly giveaways!