O, be some other name!

Old name: Yydr
New name: Llydia

Reason - short version: Too much thinking and too little sleep.



Up for discussion: Have you ever changed a character name? Your global name? Your forum name? Any other names (besides from marriage)? What lead to the decision, and did you like the result?

Also, do you have difficulty getting people to pronounce your name(s) correctly? If so, how do you react?



Reason - long version: A ramble to entertain myself. I don't really expect anyone else to read further.

Mostly I blame Comicsluvr's thread What's In a Name? It got me thinking of why I care about my character names. A lot of thinking. That much thinking can be dangerous.

It lead to me realizing that while I had let it slide for years, it bothered me that my main, Dynexus, was usually referred to as a 'he'. As was I! I gave into an impulse and paid for a rename token to make her Ms Dynexus. "There!" I thought, "Now there can be no question to her, and I, being female." How disappointing when there was no change. The same proportion of references were he. When I bemoaned that neither my character nor I were referred to as 'she', a player remarked that they thought I was faking it.

Faking it? While we are still the minority, female gamers are hardly a rarity anymore.

I decided to run a silent experiment while I teamed. As people joined, I tried to guess from their global names if their players were male or female, then learn the answer from observing how people referred to themselves. Turns out I got it wrong most of the time. Even other characters I saw with 'Ms' in the character name were dubious as many were parodies. And what about characters that were horrendously disproportional with little modesty? Hard to think of that player as female. In the end I, too, was guilty of assuming someone was male unless another player consistently referred to a third player as she/female.

Before I had arrived at that conclusion, however, I decided to take more drastic measures. If people couldn't tell that Yydr was female then I would choose something more traditional. Something obvious that no man would claim. I can't remember how many names I considered. Probably hundreds. Normally I try to avoid any name that is close to myself or people I have know for internet security purposes. I like it best when I invent a name that gets zero search results in Google. That gets harder every year. After some deliberation I suspended that rule to choose Lydia. Besides, I have liked the name Lydia since a girl a few doors down and a few years older was a good influence and friend to me as a teenager.

Except that there were already several variations of Lydia on the forums, and I still had a craving to be unique. I'd like to claim that I came up with Llydia as a tribute to the double-Y of Yydr. But the truth is that variation was inspired by The New Alphabet song. Specifically how the part "L is for llama. / Hey wait a second, what's so special about llama? / Well, you know, it starts with two l's. / What's the second one for? / I don't know. Maybe to give the first one moral support." made me laugh.

Thus I settled on the full name of Llydia Verety (meaning: "Noble" and "Truth"), though I doubt Verety will be used much beyond this post.

So after psyching myself up to it, I changed my global name at 4 am. Honestly I was a bit surprised that going from @Yydr to @Llydia worked. I thought my name defaulted to @Dynexus when global names were first introduced and I had used my one-time change to make it @Yydr. Wasn't going to complain that somehow I had picked up an extra global rename token in the intervening years.

Yes, when I woke up later in the day something like buyer's remorse kicked in as I worried that maybe I could have come up with a better name. Thankfully that didn't last. In fact, the longer I have been Llydia, the more thrilled I become.

Some pros of Yydr:
- Unique
- Short (a big plus when sending myself in-game emails)
- Familiar
- Aged (it has become rare to see people misspell it as Yddr, Ydrr, etc)

Biggest downside of Yydr:
- No one could say it correctly more than two times in a row, even when instructed that Yydr is pronounced "yɪh-dər" which rhythms with "bidder"

Some pros of Llydia:
- Easier spelling (people have commented that Yydr was hard for them to type)
- Feminine
- Common pronunciation of "LID-ee-ah"
- It is more 'me'
- I smile big every time I see my new name


Thus far the City Of Heroes community members that have noticed the change have been very supportive. Thank you for encouraging the decision to be more myself!

Yydr always looked somewhat... alien to me. Never knew how to pronounce it so always went with 'why-der'.

I approve of your new name though, as I dated a Lydia my senior year and still smile when I hear the name.

I chose Nyx, because Im a Scorpio and it's one of Pluto's moons.

It's also short.

I personally stopped careing if people thought I was female or male. In many cases it has little bearing in my game play and while I will generally speak about woman related issues, and look at my toons body proportions with more realism, I fall in the class of lady that like their comics the way they should be. Which is where my toons wear something I would absolutely never dare wear.

This game is essentially fashion dollies with esplosions.

The problem is that people are actually putting emphasis on gender now.

In a forum though...it's completely up to you how you want to be, and I am glad you found something more to your liking
You wanna think Im a guy...awesome. You wanna think Im a "chick" behind a moniter dressed in my avatars clothing (Which I assure you would mean her powers would be soley designed to actually keep her from falling out of that costume) then you can have that image too.

As for whats in a name? Yeah, it tells a lot about what your toon is about, what it does, who their identity is, but as for gender...if you are using a female avatar then your toon is female and Ill address her as such. If you are a man playing a female toon, I will still address you as she.

I am a bit confused if im honest about this thread. Are you saying you was dissapointed that people were unable to tell if you was a female from your character names and global? Or just the fact that majority instantly thinks your a male and calls you he?

On Union Chat we have quite a few times played the game of "which gender are you" as we guess the peoples chatting gender. Most of the time, like you said, we get it wrong but really it doesnt matter if a player is a girl or a boy imo until you at least start speaking to them on a semi-regular basis.

I know a few people who have VERY feminine global handles and everybody [including myself] presume they are female only to find out they are male. One of the most famous EU players has an actual global name which majority still think is a female but is a male [actually aint seen him healing in the hollows for quite a while now ].

That being said it is always funny when people find out a player is female and you see the SAME people quickly rush over and start talking to her

Edit: I chose Damz because well Blue Lightning was taken when i first started [By the way its pronounced damez not damnz ]

MaestroMavius - Well, at least I got one thing right with Yydr. Most of my alts are aliens.

Nyx - Good policy. I also try to address people by the gender of the character currently logged in unless I know the player personally.

EU_Damz - Hm, I can understand your confusion. Mostly this is an FYI announcement for the dozen or so people who actually know me as Yydr. I meant it that I didn't expect anyone to read the rest, that was purely self-indulgent rant, mostly about my own faults.

In fact, if there anything more to impart it is the recommendation to be well rested and fed before making any decision as important as your name.

Still, this is a discussion board. How about I add a question to the topic:


Have you ever changed a character name? Your global name? Any other names (besides from marriage)? What lead to the decision, and did you like the result?

Also, do you have difficulty getting people to pronounce your name(s) correctly? If so, how do you react?

Chaos Creator - Short, simple... it works!

Judgement_Dave - Now that EU_Damz has got you started, you can join Steelclaw in creating alternate lyrics to songs.

I think the only rename I've done was renaming my second account's global to match my first so everyone could tell it's me regardless of who I'm playing. I've had my globals reset a couple of times due to breaks. I'm not especially fond of my current global handle. It just happens to be the name of the first character I logged in on my main account after my last layoff. I'm not all that particular though, and it's the name everyone knows me by, so I'm not inclined to change it.

For various Internet names, I've had a few. I keep one for a few years, then move onto something else. Most web things now, have a variation of Biscuits as the name.

My first account's global name became @More Biscuits, since Biscuits is now my main toon. My second and main account, went from a random toon to @Biscuits, and now due to the merge, @Biscuits Deluxe (which is a character on the first account, oddly). That said, most folk called me Bix (which I used to refer to the toon myself, in a sort of Rebecca>Becky>Becks>Bex way), quite often people call me a typo of that, Biz, Box, Boz, etc.

I've never renamed a specific toon, as I see it as being easier to just remake it with a new name, than buy a change. I probably would pay money or inf to regain @Biscuits, however. (If you're reading this, name your inf-price, maybe we can come to an arrangement).

As for my actual name, I've not changed it due to marriage, but I did legally change it via Deed Poll. I loathed everything about the name my parents gave me, so I completely changed it, forename, middle name and surname. I'm far happier with my new name, though it irritates me that some people still call me by the old one. Especially the people who knew that I hated the old one when they met me. The old name reminded me of people that I couldn't stand, so calling me that felt like an insult. I had no previous associations with the new name, so I was the first person I thought of when I hear it, which I like.

I'm also kind of weird with names and people, that once I have an bad association with a specific name, other people I meet with the same are usually met with unshakable distrust, whereas the better namesakes are usually given the benefit of the doubt at first.

My global began back in EQ1, with my character, Shazanti. This was, of course, shortened by everyone to Shaz, Shazzie, Shazzy, and the like. Due to slight similarity with my RL name, it became a RL nickname as well, so I tend to try to get 'Shaz' wherever I can. When that's too short a name, or already taken, I go with Shazzie.

It's not particularly feminine, but it's 'my' name, I love it, and I've had it since globals came into existence. I just have to correct people all the time "it's 'she', not 'he', please"...but I've been doing that in games for over a decade now, so I'm used to it!

I changed my global name on my first account because it was orginally named after my first character who only lasted about three days. I don't think I ever changed the global on my second account, and I can't remember how to.

I think I've only ever changed the name of one character, and oddly it was my second ever character. He was a grav/kin controller and his original name was Gravimetric Man. I decided to rewrite his powers to deal with time instead of gravity, and since he was already level 25 or so, I renamed him instead of rerolling him. His new name is Dr. Time.

I've never changed my own name, and it's pretty easy to pronounce unless you are under 5 years old and have trouble with the letter "R". However, people often misspell my first name since there are two commonly accepted spellings. Also, my last name is often used as a first name, so lots of people I meet often accidentally refere to me by my last name, particularly people I talk to on the phone.

English is not my first language, but in my first language, both nouns and proper names have grammatically-assigned genders. Anything that ends in a consonant (like road) is male, anything that ends on an A sound (like canasta) is female and anything that ends on an E or O sound (cafe) is "it," along with a few other basic rules that I don't want to get into. For me, proper names always follow those basic principles in regards to which names feels like what gender. So, a "Patrick" would be male as it ends on a consonant K while "Annabella" would be female because it ends on an A sound. This gets funny, though, especially with Japanese names like "Honda" because everyone here would instinctively referred to that as a "she." Same with "ninja," amusingly enough.

Languages aside, I generally never refer to anyone online by gender or name. It's a skill in communication that I've picked up over the years both from a poor memory for names and from the Internet's ambiguity in gender. And in no small part thanks to Arcanaville. I don't recall Arcana ever confessing to a gender and all I've ever heard is people say she. Not wanting to take stranger's word for me, every time I speak about Arcana, it's never "he," "she" or "it," but always just "Arcana." I don't know how Arcanaville actually feels about this, but I've done what I can to keep my posts respectful.

It's really not that hard to do in practice, really. I got into an argument with "someone on the Internet" a while back about why you'd even use a personal name with someone you know, and my belief is the same as it was then - this shows both respect and affection in acknowledging that this person has a name which said person allows you to use freely. That's doubly so because you very much CAN speak with people and never even mention, or indeed even KNOW their names. I typically don't ask people on my Global Friends list "So what should I call you?" until about the third time we catch up. It simply isn't necessary.

Gender is a bit harder to avoid mentioning, but choosing the proper grammatical constructs makes it possible nevertheless. All one needs to do is construct sentences such that don't refer to a person directly very often. Once you have that down pat, you can simply use the person's name, or a shorthand of said name every time without making the sentences terribly redundant as I did up there with Arcana's name. In that case, it was unavoidable, but in most cases it isn't.

If gender needs to be used for some reason or another, then I will always default to the gender of the character in question. Since I don't know what the person on the other end of the line is, any gender guess would be a stab in the dark and likely to be wrong, so at least when going with character gender, there's a reason to pick what you end up picking, as well as an excuse for why you picked that.

I'd strongly advise against trying to reason out people's gender based on how they speak, act or dress their characters. You may be right once in a blue moon in the same way that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but you will be wrong most of the time and you will be tempted to make value judgement based on wrong information. Don't. This helps no-one.

*edit*
As for Samuel Tow, I picked that almost at random. I wrote a story, I needed a name, I picked one at random from what was swirling around in my head and went with it. When Globals came out and I HAD to make a forum account, I couldn't use my PlayNC Master Account name or my City of Heroes game account name, so I went with my flagship character's name, turning him into my namesake. It's gotten me recognised twice in total, I thing, since Sam's been 50 since Summer 2005 and I don't play him much.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The only characters I've renamed have been done as rerolls, and done so before level 5. I've never bought a rename token for one.

My entire character lineup is male, any female toons I have made have either remained as saved costume files, or as a concept idea I wanted to try on a different server. Because I tend to get into the world of my characters a bit, and mildly team role play on a few of them, playing as female characters has always felt odd to me. So by playing males exclusively, not only do I avoid that strange feeling, but there is also no confusion between the gender of my characters versus the gender of the player behind them.

I have been toying with the idea of changing my global name for a couple months now. Since I started playing back in '07, it's been "Winterminal." (Which for anyone who may be confused, has the odd pronunciation of win-TER-mi-nal.) Thus my nickname amongst those who know me or see me around has become "Winter." Unfortunately, the global name of "Winter" is not available . If I could go back, I would choose something a bit more universal, but now, I feel that it would be foolish for me to change my global considering that is how everyone knows me.

I knew a player, who no longer plays, who started every one of his characters with "Sykotik." So his characters were things like "Sykotik Samurai," "Sykotik Sun," "Sykotik Vortex," etc. I think if I could go back, I might tailor my characters that way, with something underlying all of them that would define me as a player. But as it is... oh well! haha

Wait? It's not Bee Style! Dang.