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Playing godparent

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?

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If anything. Gamers are worse. Full of crazy ideas that these video game names are ‘cool’ or simply lost in an area of the mind where they’ve built up so much apparent ‘love’ for their favourite characters that they’ll happily name a child after one out of respect. The same way you’d name your first born after a heroic grandfather, or something.

No one ever semes to think of the child. And kids names are definitely getting longer and more extravagant… which I fail to see is for the better. Whatever happened to the good old first, middle and last ethic?

Let’s not forget our average named video game heroes either; Gordon (half-life) John (Halo), even Mario. Nice, world saving, sensible types.

I for one often find myself feeling penalised for naming characters. With the game not giving me as full an experience as I’ve seemingly not taken it seriously enough.

I don’t think devs really want us to screw with their precious stories all that much really, and I’m with them on that. It’s a cheap hook to get you caring about the characters, I guess… but how much can you really care for an on the spot created personality, depicted only by name?

Still, it seems the need for customisation in absolutely everything these days continues… even into babies.

Aww ya see I do it the different way, when I’m naming a character they either have their original set name, as it’s how the game is meant to be played, or if they don’t have a set name I try to pick something to match the time, hence the fact of why I think it’s silly seeing people running around on an rp server of an mmo called jamdounut or something silly, I’m just being picky though ^__^

Must say I have never even thought of what I would name a child when I come round to having one, cos when it comes to picking a name for a game I can spend hours, where as for a child it’d be set in stone I think if I felt really adventurous I’d choose a name related to a game in some sorts yet obscure so not many people would think it.

All in all it’s a question that raises lots of thoughts in my head

I would love to see a Dante running about though ^__^

[...] article is in response to ‘Playing Godparent‘ by Margaret Robertson. She asks if “gamers are better or worse at naming their kids [...]

It depends on the game, but I like naming characters after obscure characters in mythology and folklore.

Seems like there’s another Mark here as well =o

Anyway, I’ve always been awful at naming game characters. I like my games enough not to ruin the experience with joke names, so I try my best to come up with good/cool names, always only coming up with terribly pretentious mutations. Generally I like to stick with default names, they feel most comfortable. The only real exception to this recently has been Chrono Trigger, where I named Frog Kaeru, because the original name simply sounded better (even if it still meant the same thing).

What a great post. It had never occurred to me before that I might be training myself to be better at naming things.

I’ve shared a Zelda cart with someone who ignorantly called the main character “Zelda”. Hahaha, fool.

Interesting question. I always loved making up names for my characters, never picking the existing, real names. I also don’t pick names from the other game’s characters. For example, I won’t have a character on Guild Wars called Yuna or Zelda, even though I love Final Fantasy and Zelda games. I also never pick names that mean anything or I have seen used for anything before. My names are purely mine.
I have a 12 year old son and his name is made up. It’s not a ‘real’ name in the conventional sense of the word. I just liked the sound of it.

FF12:RV on the DS has an option to name your weapons. Since I want to make sure I can tell them from the generic stuff you find in the game, I always take that option. Unfortunately, rather than thinking up a cool name, I’m just running through some cod-Latin numbers (such as Primus, Secondus, Tritus, etc) as I go. Once upon a time, I would’ve given it more thought…

I know of three conventions amongst people I know:

1. The Lazy

Some of my friends play Zelda games as Link, name there Pokemon “Mouse” or “Bird” or even just “Pikachu 1″. On good days, this is me.

2. The Random

A lot of people just chuck anything in that comes to mind and don’t think about it. Observe: almost every gamertag. I haven’t ever met anyone that spent more than five minutes choosing theirs – and regretted it five minutes later.

3. The Joker

On bad days, I and several people I know just chuck in something funny, mostly pathetic toilet humour. As such, I never really “get” RPGs, mostly because my characters have names like “fartbaloon” or “motorboatinsonofabitch”.

And that’s just the people I know.

In short, custom named characters are an outdated experiment that should have disappeared a long time ago, in my opinion.

M Knight Shyamalan doesn’t let me rename characters in his scripts, I won’t let people rename characters in my games.

Harumph.

My point is that I dont think anyone cares that much about a game character you get to name yourself. I don’t think that has any bearing on a real person, because you’d probably care more about that, being – as you are – its creator.

I don’t think, even subconsciously, that any players consider a character “theirs” because they named them, nor should they, unless the story the character will enter is entirely “theirs” (ie, unless its an MMO or other multiplayer game)

Hmm, bit long after it was posted but nevermind!

I mostly use the default name in games, except if I really don’t like it (‘Dagger’ in FF9, ‘Frog’ in CT)when I’d do the most lazy thing and look up the word in another language(became Hishu and Kaeru) – usually Japanese as that’s the only dictionary I can ever find :3

Maybe if I was naming my child, I would look up ‘Spoon’ or ‘Brat’ or something in another language – and wait until the child becomes curious enough to look their name up on Google ..

I’d love to be called Spoon.

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