A Handle By Any Other Name

The other night while I was eating dinner (a delicious bag o’ salad), some controversy arose in the game when Rose kicked some guy out of the guild for having a toon named Whoured. She blogged about it so I’m not going to go into whether I think it was justified, and we’ve kicked others out for having offensive names.

Rose feels strongly about names, as do many other gamers. In MMOs, your name is the one thing that really distinguishes you. Your looks, not so much. In SWG they could be rearranged according to whim, in WoW you have a few options with regard to facial features and jewelry and hairstyle, and even in Sims Online there was not a huge variety to choose from. And the main reason I couldn’t settle into Everquest was the fact that all the avatars looked so much alike, and I found that creepy.

Generally speaking, most people wound up using “the one with the long hair” as their personal model. That goes for men as well as women. In SWG the Qui-Gon hairstyle (a sort of flowing mullet) was ever popular, and on my WoW server there are a whole lot of blood elf guys who looked like they stepped out of an 80's heavy metal video. There are always a few holdouts with the next longest hairstyle, and guys going for more of a butch, shaved-head look, but if you want to blend into the crowd, go for the long hair, no matter what gender you’re playing.

And so despite all the choices you get as far as detailing, people in MMOs tend look even more alike than my fellow office workers on the bus this morning.

You can also distinguish yourself by accomplishments and gear – to a point. In SWG, things got to the point where everybody and their mom were wearing the same armor (because it had the best stats). There was variation in color, but once word got around that Armor X had the highest number of points, it became the only thing to wear. Also in SWG, people looking at your character could tell what professions they’d mastered and feats they had accomplished . . . but it was the same list for everyone, so it became more of a matter of seeing how long someone had been playing (due to the presence of accomplishments on their resume that had been removed from the game).

In WoW, on the other hand, you can outfit yourself in epic gear, thus showing everyone that either you are a very competent player or that you buy gold from gold farmers (or, if it’s an epic flying mount, that you know how to hook up with people on Craigslist).

So your looks distinguish you in game even less than they do IRL. This leaves only your handle as the means by which your friends can tell you apart from the other long haired adventurers wandering around.

I’ve been known to spend an extremely long time coming up with handles, before I got to my current “just name them all after rabbits” policy, and even then I struggle. I’ve been meaning to get around to making an undead and a tauren for a long time, and all that’s stopped me has been my inability to come up with good rabbit-oriented names.

A lot of my naming revolves around my playstyle. I’m good at games, I type fast, I like to crack jokes and my attention span wanders. Early on I learned that I confuse people less if I choose avatars that have some connotation of “sociable yet snarky airhead.” A mercurial trickster type, sort of like Bugs Bunny, yet female. (The airheadedness comes more from my tendency to wander afk and get distracted, or to have multiple conversations going at once – if I’m playing a very serious gothy toon it comes across as coldness or rudeness, but if I’m playing a “blonde” it translates as well-intentioned flakiness).

Then there’s the fact I’ve got a pet bunny that I’m fond of. I’ve known a lot of people that base their avatar’s name on their pet’s name. It’s sort of an interesting exercise in anthropomorphism, playing a human with the basic personality of your pet.

I’ve had people assume that because I go for bunny names, I’m an aspiring Playboy model or something similar IRL. I tend to dismiss those types as boring folks who spend more time looking at porn than watching cartoons. There are guys who will sexualize just about anything a female says or does, and some of them are gamers.

Sometimes, though, it’s amusing to hear what people’s speculations based on your handle are.

In Sims Online, I briefly had a character named Houseboy, which was based on a running joke between me and my ex-husband. Houseboy was my first male toon. He had flowing, romance novel hair (like Fabio) and was shirtless. He was sort of similar to what a lot of guys do when creating a “female slave” toon, which is fairly common, especially in “utility” or “bot” type characters that exist more for convenience than roleplaying. He basically existed to be the passive side of a two-player money making game that I could play running two characters at once. And he was a “houseboy” because, unlike my mean neglectful ex-husband who often wouldn’t make me a pot of coffee while visiting the kitchen for a snack (and who complained that I was treating him like a houseboy if I pestered him about it), Houseboy always cheerfully brought coffee for everyone.

Houseboy was wildly popular with the ladies, especially dominant types. I’d never received that particular kind of attention before. A lot of them thought he was a submissive male slave, something apparently that was on their shopping list. Of course, a lot of them were probably guys roleplaying being dominant females, but quite a few had that “legit female” vibe. They terrified me. I didn’t like taking Houseboy out in public because of them.

Houseboy was also an example of my being an imperialistic bigot, which was pointed out to me once by some twenty year old who had taken a few liberal arts classes. Never mind that Houseboy was white (although suntanned due to his habit of never wearing a shirt), his name alone signified that I was having Scarlett O’Hara fantasies involving subjugating a person of color, stripping away his rights (and his shirt) and forcing him to bring my tyrannical main character coffee (which was construed as symbolic of my desire to economically exploit South America).

In fact, the only people who “got” the concept that I was doing a gender reversal on the “slave girl” utility character were a pack of my girlfriends, and I was so grateful they understood the joke that I let them objectify Houseboy all they wanted, but only if I was afk on him while active on my other toon.

My main Sims Online toon was Malibu Cali. She was a re-roll of one of my earlier ones, Cali, whose name basically meant “I live in California,” except she was pale white and I decided I like the “medium” tinted skin better, so I threw a “Malibu” on the front, a la Malibu Barbie (a suntanned version of Barbie that came with a swimsuit and surfboard). This caused a lot of people to assume I was literally located in Malibu, California.

I definitely noticed that people in Sims Online tended to read a lot into a character’s name, while in SWG and WoW, there’s not nearly as much assumption that your handle reflects some literal truth about the real you.

I actually did something like that with my first SWG character, who had basically my first name with an extra letter, and my hair color (in the long hair style everyone picks, because I actually do have long hair IRL). But it creeped me out, especially when I’d accidentally back into a corner or something and the camera would close in on her face. So I became the Easter Durni on my next attempt, after finding a pack of vicious carnivorous SWG bunnies known as “durnis,” and that identity “stuck.”

However, then I found myself walking the line between the serious role players, who all had names appropriate for characters in a non-ironic sci fi story, and the irreverent PVPers, who tended to have joke handles.

And while people weren’t so exasperatingly literal in their assessment of your character based on your handle, there was still a lot of judging and analyzing going on,

To the point where I can sort of classify the kinds of reactions different handles will get, almost like a horoscope (“if you were born under the sign of ___, you are a this kind of person”).

1. The “I Don’t Do Imagination” Handle

Handle is version of real name, or sometimes something extremely generic like “Orcwarrior.”

These people are protesting the fact they’re in a MMO to begin with, and letting you know that they’re not fooled, they’re way too smart for that, the other players may think everything is real but this person knows they’re only an avatar in the game of life. They’re more likely to assume that others’ handles are literal clues, and to complain about nonessential and atmospheric features in the game. They can be insufferable when going around proclaiming their superiority, but sometimes they just couldn’t think of a name but didn’t want to go with a randomly generated one. A lot of the time, this is one of those players who professes to be totally unconcerned with anything other than sheer numbers – graphics, character development, story, anything remotely aesthetic is sneered at as being a useless feature. Doesn’t explain why they’re playing a MMO rather than something more numerical like fantasy football or poker though.

2. The “This Could Be a Fictional Character” Handle

Most of my gamer friends seem to use these. They sound like normal human names with a touch of the foreign and/or exotic, names you could imagine real people having. Sometimes they are randomly generated and sometimes they’re a combination of random and a few personal syllables of their own. They are basically striving to play a plausible fantasy character whose name wouldn’t seem jarring if you came across it in a novel yet is still easy to pronounce. Many of the hardcore roleplayers in SWG went for this type of name and looked down upon all other types as immersion-breakers, and to an extent they have a point – it would be very jarring if the hero of a fantasy story went into town and ran into some guy named Iheartsecks or something similar.

Buuuuuut, as in a point I made last night, maybe “Iheartsecks” could conceivably mean “brave warrior” in some barbaric alien dialect. After all, there are plenty of people with names that cause people to snicker in real life. I dated a guy whose last name was “Woodcock” for a while, and then there’s Don Ho, may he rest in peace.

And, as I used to remind overly serious SWG players, the Star Wars canon includes beings with names like Hammerhead, Salacious Crumb, Droopy McCool and Sy Snootles.

I tend not to get along with overly serious types. To some extent, having a goofy handle scares the most self-important ones away.

3. The Nickname Handle

A lot of people play under versions of their RL name. There was a kid in SWG who played with his dad as his family nickname, a baby talk version of his first name. These can be great handles because they’re personal yet have that otherworldly quality. On the downside, they’re making it very clear that they are a player playing a game, not a player playing a character. Although they’re a little more immersed than the type 1s with their plain generic handles, often they’re using vocal interface or playing with people they know IRL and are usually having more of a “crowd of people watching a movie” experience than a “reading a book by yourself” type experience.

4. The Real Name Handle

There was a famous jedi named Kim Monroe on my SWG server. I never met Kim Monroe when s/he was being played by an actual person named Kim Monroe because that person apparently created the character just to level it to jedi and then sell the account on ebay, thus forcing the buyer to “be” Kim Monroe in exchange for having awesome powers.

Kim Monroe changed hands many times. Sometimes it would be an illiterate beggar and sometimes it would surprise you by being articulate and a decent fighter. There was no way of knowing who might be animating Kim Monroe on any particular day, or whether they knew much about the game.

I had a very pointless discussion with one of these guys in Sims Online about why he chose to use his real name for a handle. It just never occurred to him to be someone else. In fact, he thought people with non-realistic handles were somehow being deceitful.

4. The Irreverent Handle

Sometimes they’re hilariously original and funny, like Easter Durni. Okay, that one’s not too amazing but it did wind up on some peoples’ lists of amusing character names. I had my own running list of amusing character names too, which included such luminaries as Admiral Snackbar, Dudat Samorra, Haleigh Comette, Bekillin Yousoon, Hotta Mali and so on. Sometimes they’re puns based on slang related to the game, like a character named Blue Dot (when a blue dot appeared on the radar of an aspiring jedi, everything froze in suspense while the jedi determined whether it was a bounty hunter that might suddenly open fire), or one named Corpseof (who was apparently looking forward to lying on a battlefield someday with “corpse of Corpseof” floating above his head).

Basically, any name that Bart Simpson ever used while prank calling Moe’s Bar and Grill will work as an irreverent handle. And because sense of humor is such a subjective thing, people with irreverent handles are sometimes richly rewarded by other players who are amused and sometimes inexplicably shunned by other players who are not amused.

And, as to be expected in an age of shock jocks and comedians competing to see who can come closest to the edge of offensiveness, a lot of irreverent handles come off as just plain crude.

5. The Sexy Handle

In South Park’s WoW episode, it is revealed that Cartman’s toon is named ILove2Spooge. Which is hilarious to those who have spent a lot of time playing MMOs and running into people aiming for clever-irreverent and hitting tasteless-dumb instead, and speculating that IRL they’re probably run by obnoxious potty-mouthed little kids whose mom is too busy making porn films to supervise them, just like Eric Cartman.

Still, it’s pretty much a given that when you come across a guy with a crude sexual innuendo handle, it’s probably a little boy. Rose mentioned a couple in her blog that we’ve had the misfortune to encounter lately: Whoured, Lickmycrack, Zeamon.

But there are other types of sexually oriented handles that aren’t specific to little boys. There’s the player going out of their way to put on a sexual display. I’ve noticed that it’s common for some people new to MMOs to go overboard in referring to their sexuality, their wealth, or other things that get them power IRL. Then they find themselves trapped in a commie pinko virtual universe where everyone starts on the same page and where it doesn’t matter if you were class president and prom royalty out there, in here you’re just another stupid handle until you can develop a reputation. Even worse, appearance is leveled too, so while you might be able to command some attention in the outside world for being young and cute, in here everybody and their mom is young and cute. And just as there are boys like Cartman trying to represent themselves as studly sex machines, there are also girls playing the “Don’tcha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me” card.

For some, presenting as someone who gets a lot of sex IS their fantasy, just as others fantasize by presenting as a brave warrior or a sneaky rogue or a priest with strange powers.

And for some, sexual roleplay is one of their main reasons for being in this kind of world, whether they’re gender swapping or experimenting with dominance and submission or other kinds of activities they may be too shy to engage in IRL.

As for me, while I’m not terribly offended by any of it, I don’t want a lot of sexuality in my particular fantasy universe, so I tend to avoid most of the people who seem mainly interested in cybering. There’s a lot of difference between a young guy player using a deliberately sexual handle as a throwdown to encourage others to fight with them, a female player constantly calling attention to her sexuality because she’s accustomed to interacting that way (or because she doesn’t feel sexy IRL and wants to experience a virtual simulation), a shy cybertransvestite who would face harsh penalties in his small town if he dared to go outside the house in a dress, and a crafty MMO-hoe looking for people to paypal her some of next month’s rent in exchange for explicit typing and webcam services. Ultimately though, I am really not interested in any of it.

And so while I am glad these players go around wearing explicit labels so they can find what they’re looking for, at the same time I’m glad they’re labeled because it makes it easier for me to avoid them.

6. The “Impersonating Another Character” Handle

I’m guilty here. I’ve got two characters named for minor characters in my favorite novel, Watership Down. I don’t think I’d go for any of the characters that has a lot of dialogue though, to my mind those characters have already been thoroughly established by the author.

Using the names of characters from other works is specifically forbidden in the rules for both SWG and WoW, which makes sense. Probably a lot of people would like to play as Harry Potter, so why should the first one to come up with the idea be the “real” Harry Potter of the server? And further, why should Harry Potter live in the World of Warcraft, or the Galaxies of Star Wars, anyway? Everybody knows he belongs at Hogwarts.

People get away with impersonating characters less famous than Harry Potter all the time. My BF’s female character was based on a single game token from an obscure sci fi game he played as a teen, featuring a blaster-pistol wielding lady designated as Lyra Starfire. A friend of mine who has no doubt finished school and become a game designer by now used to frequently play as an elven archer from the Heroes of Might and Magic game. I’ve seen people in MMOs named after characters from other games such as Final Fantasy, and KOTOR. One of my SWG characters was named after Xena’s daughter.

And consider this: people, and pets, and other fictional characters, are named after fictional characters all the time. If I roll up a character named Bette, I could be playing her as Bette Davis, or one of her characters, or Bette Midler (who was named after Bette Davis), or as my friend’s dog who was named after Bette Midler (hey, there’s a strong resemblance). If I make a dude named Robin, I might have Robin Hood in mind, or Batman and, or I might be thinking of Brave Sir Robin from the Holy Grail film (or even of my teenage crush on Robin Zander of Cheap Trick).

Still, there’s a definite classiness scale with regard to snagging handles from existing characters. Something like Larrrra Croft or Da’rth’Va’Der would be near the bottom of the scale and someone named after, oh, a minor character from Chaucer or Shakespeare would place a little higher. Going to see 300 and then naming your character after an obscure Spartan from history is cool. Going to see 300 and then naming your character Sparrttin (I saw one of those recently) is not.

Which leads us to

7. xxXsxx - - and - - Ap’ostro’phes

Ugh. Just ugh. Although occasionally forgivable. Especially if it’s only one apostrophe. Although I personally used several to get past the name filter in SWG when I built my Ewok detention center and one of the winners in the Name-The-Ewoks contest came up with the stunningly brilliant Osama Bear Laden.

But still, the Xs get to me, as in you want to name your character Bill, but that name is taken, so instead you go for xxBillxx. or ooBilloo or B’ill or –Bill– or anything similar. It makes your name hard to spell, and if your name is hard to spell people won’t want to talk to you.

The absolute bottom of the barrel is people who use the multinational character set for their WoW names and then end up saying things like “to type my three letter name, just do ctrl+135479, ctrl+4564656 and ctrl+1344258!” I have a better idea: not typing their name at all.

8. The Slave Toon

Similar to my Houseboy toon, slave toons are created for purely utilitarian reasons and often their names reflect that. I actually saw one named Crafter Alt once.

More often, the slave alt happens when a guy gets an extra toon and decides to make his ideal woman, so he gives her an objectifying sort of name and dresses her in sleazy clothes. But what he doesn’t realize, as I learned with Houseboy, is that you end up actually being this person you created solely to objectify, and while you’re doing that, others are not going to relate to you as the supposedly clever person who created the slave, they will treat you as though you are the slave.

I’ve known more than one guy who ends up so fascinated being his own fantasy girl that he ends up playing her more than his main.

9. The Subculture Reference

Trogdor. Deadparrot. Whitewidow. TokiWartooth. JuggaloJoe. Unless you’re in on the joke and/or drug reference and/or band, names like that will slide right past you while encouraging other initiates to come over and start up a conversation by saying something like “burninate!!!”

I’ve always been fascinated by subcultures even though I rarely actually belong to them. Even then, experience has taught me that in some subcultures I can probably spend a couple of enjoyable hours cracking jokes and in other subcultures I’m likely to run into lots of people who get on my nerves.

I will admit, however, that frequently, when picking a server, I make a toon with a generic name and cruise around seeing what kind of subcultures are represented. If I run into a lot of toons named after subcultures I don’t really get along with, I’m outta there. But if there’s an established presence of people who like bands I enjoy, jokes that make me laugh and intoxicants that don’t necessarily turn everyone who touches them into a babbling idiot, I’ll stick around.

and finally

10. Names Calculated To Piss People Off

This is what we were discussing in game last night. Names referring to poo, names that are blatantly sexist or racist or gross. A lot of people won’t even talk to them. I’ll talk to them, and in fact have had occasional pleasant gaming experiences with people bearing foul names. But for the most part, offensive names are offensive, and although some of the people who choose them did so in a fit of anti-authoritarian naughtiness without realizing they’d be spending several hours of their lives living as Fartbreath or Whoured or whatever, and that some of those hours they’d be more in the mood for neutral conversation rather than being all confrontational, but due to the handle, most people would rather just shun them on sight.

Sometimes it’s not clear whether they’re aiming for “clever and funny” yet missed by a mile. Or sometimes it could be that in their social circle, fart and poo and bigotry pass for “clever and funny.”

A friend of mine who was into the kinky stuff once told me that a lot of masochists tend to go around being confrontational and stirring up fights in the hopes that someone will get pissed off and yell at them, maybe even kick their ass. Until then, I assumed that confrontational people were your basic sadistic bully types. I guess it can go both ways, but hearing that made me a lot less willing to yell at them for getting in my face, just on the off chance that being yelled at gives them warm happy feelings. These days I’m more inclined to give them as little of my attention as possible, since it’s apparent that’s what they’re really craving.

WoW does seem to have a lot more players with bad names than SWG did, and I’m told Lineage II is a lot worse.

And as far as the deliberately offensive ones go, names are advertising – and in WoW, where you can’t have houses and spaceships and plastic surgeons that can give you freckles, it’s your only creative contribution to the game.

So, if you are a juvenile 14 year old seeking same for mischief and homework avoidance, or if you are a horny pervert looking for fellowship with other horny perverts, or if you’re a Python fan or a pothead or an anime enthusiast or an emo listener, your handle is the only way to screen your contacts while advertising what you are seeking as far as companionship.