Recently my friend decided he wanted to give up his gaming moniker. It was a name he’d had for a long time but it no longer appealed to him, it no longer identified who he is. He wanted something unique, something he could use across all platforms and media, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, etc. Something without numbers or excessive use of X. So we embarked on a quest to discover his new gaming identity.
The first thing we did was people watch, or rather, gamertag watch.
I hate to say it, one of my favorite things to do online, in any multiplayer setting, is to look at all the different IDs out there. I’ll stay in one place just marveling at everything that has spewed forth from my fellow gamers. Friends and I will make comments about this name or that name, laugh or groan, or even get angry. I’m not ashamed to admit that. I’ll even stand up and applaud, at my desk or in my living room, when I find a clever tag. It’s a good time.
Gaming hasn’t always been online, shocking, I know. It’s still a fairly recent development. You used to go home and boot up your poison of choice and play as a character, offline, through a story to its completion, or until you got bored, or stuck, or lost/damaged the game. Or you played your favorite title at the arcade. Closest we got to unique tags were three letters for high scores.
As soon as gaming went online the (ahem) game changed. We suddenly had this device that was plugged in to the world wide interwebs that allowed us interact and play with friends without sitting in the same room. Much like AOL, we needed a screen name. We needed something to identify who we were to friends and strangers alike. Eventually Steam happened, then Battle.net and it snowballed from there to where almost every place we now game requires a name that identifies us to all. No matter what character you may be happily playing, everything is under the same umbrella of your your unique ID. Except Star Wars: The Old Republic, you still have to add people by character name, which is maddening if your friends have multiple characters. Like mine. Or, rather, like me. Hi, my name is Stephanie and I’m an altaholic.
Gamertag watching has been a hobby of ours, my friends and mine, for a while, but this time we were looking with a purpose. One thing I have noticed over the years is all tags tend to fall into one of five categories, categories that I have helpfully outlined below. However, like with everything, there are exceptions. If you know of any naming conventions I’ve overlooked, happy to add them.
1. NUMBERS
A good chunk of gamertags have numbers. Ok, I get it, your name was taken so you slap some numbers on the end of it. Google tells me this is an accepted strategy when the name you want is taken. Science tells me it’s either your birth year or your age. (Seriously, there have been studies.) How about a little imagination that doesn’t include numbers? My first screen name had a number at the end because I REALLY wanted Freefall. We all make mistakes.
Names where companies force a number at the end of your ID don’t count, Battle.net and ArenaNet I’m looking at you guys.
2. CREATIVE SPELLING
Then there are those that have words spelled various ways. Again, the name you really wanted was taken so instead of going the numbers route you “got creative” and spelled things a different way. This is not what I meant by using your imagination. I don’t endorse this in fantasy world building so I normally don’t endorse it in gaming. But, I do understand it. I went through that phase too, when I was about 12, maybe 15.
I will spend untold amounts of time when naming characters, if the name I like is taken I go back the drawing board, I do not change a few letters just to get the name I want. What happens when you run into someone with the exact same name just spelled differently? You know who you are, World of Warcraft elf hunters named various forms of Legolas, or Drizzt.
3. XXX
Another large portion have some variation of multiple X’s in their name. Clearly the X’s mean you are more badass. I don’t understand it but, to be fair, it’s the same complaint I have with advertisers, you are not more extreme just by spelling it “Xtreme”, it’s just science.
4. 1EE7 5P34K
LEET Speak is still around, apparently. Or maybe they haven’t gotten around to changing their names. This one could fall under the category of creatively spelling words, but it could be adding numbers, I just don’t know. I’m not sure why this is still a thing.
5. WTF?
Finally, my least favorite; the sexual, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, and general asshattery names that make me sad to call myself a gamer. You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones that use a combination of the previous four to say horribly offensive things just to see if they can get it by the censors. They tend to say they did it for the lulz, or because “it’s funny because it’s true”, or some other inane excuse. I associate these names with a certain demographic of gamer and take their names as warnings to steer clear because I don’t have time to deal with that nonsense. I also assume they are Trump supporters.
Look, you may think your name is funny now. You and your friends may get a chuckle out of it. But what happens when you get a significant other that may or may not find your gamertag of “PushHerPoopIn” funny? You will have to explain yourself. What about when you meet the parents and, innocently, you load up your machine to play a game or two, not thinking about your tag but someone notices? What happens when you need to call customer service as an older and wiser you but have yet to change your name? You will have to say that name out loud and maybe spell it just to be sure.
Does this example seem a bit specific? It should, my friend had to deal with just this scenario. The tag had existed for years and, as things go it faded into the background as just more words, no thought given to it. Until one day, when a call had to be made to customer service, until the explanation had to be made to the significant other, until the significant other’s parents were over for wedding planning one night.
6. BONUS CATEGORY – UNIQUE NAMES
There is one more category. The names that are unique and need no creative spelling, no numbers, no X’s, and are most certainly not offensive. When I find one of these elusive unicorns out in the wild I tend to cheer silently, or burst excitedly over chat/headset about the cleverness of the name. Kudos to you guys, you know who you are. I salute you. You keep on doing you.
All of this brings us back to the search for my friends name. His old name was a pun, a fairly decent one, but it fell into the category of adding numbers at the end and he just wanted out. He was too old for that shit.
So there we were, weeks passed, my friend searched far and wide for his gamertag. He interrogated NPCs, researched the tomes of the internet, bested numbers and creative spellings galore. Eventually he did find a name that perfectly suited him, a phrase he says all the time. I won’t repeat it here because privacy and all that, but it’s suits him perfectly. Best of all, it falls solidly into Bonus Category 6.
While gamertags aren’t permanent, if you don’t want them to be, they do live forever in one form or another and you really don’t want a name to come back from the dead and haunt you later on in life. Things could get a tad awkward.
Please name yourself responsibly. We’ll be judging you.
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