How many things have you named? A dog and a couple of rats or hamsters, maybe. Perhaps your car. Hopefully no parts of your anatomy. And that’s usually about it.
But think again. Dozens of RPG heroes. Hundreds of Pokémon. Squads of worms, phalanxes of chaos soldiers – heroes, pets, sidekicks, nemeses. Gamers have more experience naming things than all the world’s entymologists, rabbit breeders and orphanage mistresses put together.
So, the chances are you’ve been through all the systems. System one is usually naming everything after your friends and family. System two is usually naming things after parts of your anatomy, just to see if you can. System three is when you start to get cute, reckoning that it’s worth going through the entire game with a character called ‘Cancer’, just for the moment when ‘You’ve been killed by…’ pops up on your mate’s screen and all the politically correct people in the room heads explode. Stage four is when creative fatigue starts to kick in, and you start sticking with the defaults - not least because checking GameFAQs is a ruinous bore when you can’t remember whether your SpottleBrink was originally Balthier or Basch. Stage five is when you start devising your own systems, naming things alphabetically, or theming them by character class. Stage six is when you start categorising all your different naming systems, all the better to cross-reference.
There’s no doubt that getting it wrong can ruin a game – indeed, the better the game the more ruinous the introduction of a goofy character name can be. And in some games taking over naming duties feels almost sacriligeous. I’ve shared Zelda carts where everyone was so determined to be purist that one save had to be ‘Link’, one ‘LINK’ and one ‘link’.
But after decades of finding names for dinosaur hunters, FOmarls, space pirates and chewnicorns, here’s my question. Are gamers better or worse at naming their kids than normal people? Does our experience pay off, now that we’ve got all the dumb names out of our systems, and have learned the hard way how being kooky and original starts to pall after 300 hours? Or are we over-confident, straying from the ‘A-Z of Baby Names That Grandparents Will Know How To Spell’. Will we give rise to a generation of Sarias and Dantes and Bastilas who’ll never forgive us? And if we do, will they rebel by calling all their Pokémon things like David, John, Mary and Ann?
My GDC swag this year consists of: 2 USB memory sticks, 1 bruised spine, 6000 air miles, dozens of business cards, a 3-figure mobile phone bill and hundreds of un-answered emails. So, apologies if you’re waiting for me to get back to you - I’m catching up, I promise. In the meantime, as literally several of you have requested, here’s the powerpoint (10 meg, sorry) for my ‘Treat Me Like A Lover’ session. I’m not sure how much sense the slides will make on their own, so I’m working on a transcript, which I’ll post up here when it’s done. Hopefully GDCRadio will be up soon, so you can download it there, in the highly unlikely event you want to spend $8 on hearing me be smutty about Advance Wars. Cheers to everyone who turned out at the painful hour of 9am Friday to hear me rant, and thanks for all the kind comments after.
