Fun Facts aboutCharacter Names

Christian Thurau & Anders Drachen

(and Menno Van Zaanen, Thea Drachen, Peter Juel Henrichsen and everyone at IEEE

CIG 2009-2010)

Healbot

Bloodmaster

Moonlight

Mortar

Zelda

Do paladins always have names like ”Healbot”?

Do Warlocks always have names like ”Ûberslayer?”

Are mages always called ”Gandalf”?

Are there any kind of ?

Dataset:18,000,000

,000Characters

(A lot)

NameRaceClass

PlaytimeGuild

Server typeDomain...etc. ...

7,938,335

Characters – after selecting only 50 biggest US and EU guilds(a more manageable lot)

Some findings

50 biggest guilds US and EU servers: 4,559,746 US characters 3,378,589 EU characters

PvE, PvP, PvE sever types

RP only 10% of total number of names

Some findings

3,803,819

unique names(a surprising lot)

More diverse than real-world names - despite naming constrictions

Looks like naming is important to players – only unique feature you have

RP-characters most diverse (83% unique – rest ~58%)

Any relationships between name and game features?

Class

Any relationships between name and game features?

Race

Races

”Pretty” ”Bestial”

2D-isomap projection (dimensionality reduction technique) ”pretty” races named differently than

”bestial” races Not due to differences in m/f character

ratios

Gnomes and dwarfs named as ”bestial” races?

==

RP vs. PvP/PvE servers

Names on US servers different from EU servers

Except for RP realms (larger overlap btw. EU/US)

Can we predict names?

What is the chance that ”Gimli” will be a dwarf?

Estimated conditional propabilities of a given class/race/server type given a particular character name

Class and Race best predictors, but server type and faction also hints at naming decisions

Some names are very good predictors, others are not -> so yes, Gimli will likely be a dwarf

Sources of inspiration

Sources of inspiration

1000 most common names

128,058

(not a lot, but hey it´s manual coding ...)(still 100* bigger than any other study)

38 coding categories foundSome names multiple categories/hard to classify (e.g. ”Raziel”)

Sources of inspiration Regular vanilla real-world names most

common (Sara, Mia, etc.) [186]

Mythology – notably Greek [164] Anubis, Odin, Ares, Loki, Nemesis My character is a god!

Popular culture – games, cartoons, film ... [174] Naruto, Sakura, Tidus, Valeria, Revan, Zelda

Fantasy literature (Tolkien rules supreme) [39] Earendil, Sonea, Morgoth, Aragorn

A lot of names in breach of ToU

Sources of inspiration

697 of 1000 names categorizedRest: Nouns, verbs of unspecified

nature

Semantic nature to categorize:

”Negative”: Nightmare, Sin, Fear, Requiem

”Positive”: Hope, Love, Pure ”Neutral”: Who, Moonlight, Magic, Snow

Sources of inspiration

Names with negative semantic meaning 6 times more common than positive semantic

Are gamers depressed?

Or do ”dark” names just sound cooler?

Sources of inspiration

ChuckNorrisBatman

MooTankadin

ShambulanceGnomercy

Perspectives

Lots of ”why”´s unanswered:

Why are certain names more popular than others?

Why do the Mage class exhibit a greater variety of names than other classes?

Why do some players pick names of characters from the same game they are playing?

Need to talk to the players ...

Perspectives

You did all this work ... why?

1) It was fun ...

2) Informs about the people who play games Marketing, research inquiry

3) Informs design What types of names are associated with

what kinds of character features?

Thank you