Saturday with Sach: Whats In a Name
NAMING - IN THE BEGINNING
I had the curious privilege of seeing the internet as we know it form into what it is today from my childhood. There was a dark time, a scary time, when the internet wasn't really a thing people knew about, or used. We had to do some scary stuff to get information back then. DARK things. Things like, "asking people questions in real life". Who even has time for that, right? How did we live?!
When it came time to have a presence on the internet, I went through a lot of names. The one I probably had the longest (before Sacheverell) was "Pretzel", a handle I used in a lot of MMOs and FPS games. What made me choose that name? I was probably hungry. Who knows. What mattered was that people knew me by that name, and it became a part of me. Our in-game names are, in a sense, who we are; it's not even what the name implies, or where it came from, but the association we bring with it. When someone sees our in-game name, they immediately think of us, the person - what we're like, whether we're friends or not, games we play together, all that good stuff. The nature of an in-game name isn't exactly rocket science, but there is one part of it that fascinates me to no end: the origin of a name.
WHO WE ARE TODAY, AND WHY
I would never ask of you anything I wouldn't do myself, so let's start with the origin of my in-game name, "Sacheverell". In short, it came from a love for tabletop games. Without getting into all the boring details, it was the name of an entity in a particular game that I thought sounded neat, had a neat theme, and it was fun to say aloud, besides. In my voice-acting work, it was handy to have a name that resonated in a catchphrase, and it serves that purpose well. If I had to name one regret over it though, it would be how much trouble people seem to have with it, both in spelling and spoken aloud: I've seen Sacherevell, Sachaverall, Suchaverel, and countless other variations. Out loud, it gets even sillier. A wise man once told me that I should've picked an easier name, and in many ways, he was right. If I had stuck with something simpler - say, Pretzel - there would be a lot less confusion. To be fair, I've seen a lot of people mistakenly call him "criticsquid", which seems to bother me a lot more than it bothers him. Though, the idea of replacing a citrus-based descriptor with the image of a film critic still makes me giggle a little.
WHO ARE YOU, AND WHY
Forget me for a minute, let's talk about you! What made you choose your in-game name? Is there a cool back-story, with some deeper personal meaning? Did you take it off a cereal box? Smash the keyboard with a hammer? No story is too awesome or silly! Let's hear about your in-game name!
Everybody just calls me TK for short, because they can't spell/pronounce it, and that's fine. Heck, a couple of my friends call me TK in real life more than they use my name, so that's fine too. It identifies a conceptual part of who I am, and thus it is *my* name, in a sense.
The other explanation for my name, the one more people believe, is the following:
It was inspired by how the old EverQuest MMO was often called "EverCrack" due to how addictive it could be to play. I just did the same thing with the Minecraft name to show how addictive I found it to be. I started using this nick "MineCrak" back in 2010 with my first minecraft account then eventually when I made an account here. I dropped the second 'c' in Crack because I thought it looked better.
Wala! "MineCrak".
Of course, the first story is the truthiest one.
Of course THIS name was used by other people - so started using variations (k3rm1t, kerms, KermitTFrog - you get the idea)
Later I started playing Team Fortress 2 / Day of Defeat - but instead of using tactics as a newbie I just 'went for it' & of course kept getting killed...
A few players in chat started saying things like 'Are you suicidal ?' or 'Thanks for being easy cannon fodder' (stuff like that)..
So I changed my name to 'SuicidalCannonFodder'... just to describe the type of gameplay I used (if there was a sniper no-one could find. I sacrificed myself so they could figure out where)
When joining up to other on-line games, communities etc.. some sites wouldn't allow the word 'Suicidal' in the nick so I dropped it...Also found that 'Cannonfodder' was being used in many Forums, so started playing with alternatives just like I did with 'kermit' to find something 'unique'
One day I mis-spelled my name on joining up to yet another forum - I forgot the '3' - and the name sort of stuck
Anyway, mine is a rather obscure cartoon character from The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse.
So that's I got "Malloon" and "MalloonTarka".
and I just really like Strongbad and the other characters from the Homestarrunner web cartoons,
Strongbad's computer was the lappy 486, and in his action movie (not actually a movie)
he played a corrupt detective named Dangeresque,
so that is how I got my screen name and I'm actually really happy with it,
even though people have trouble pronouncing it.
Alpha being the first letter of the ancient greek alphabet.
Alphabet is also greek. lol
SpawnKill542 on the other hand was my youtube name idea.
I didnt want friends to recognize my profile.
I wanted them to subscribe for what I did, not because it was me.
And as for redneck_ninja, that was created in one of my random rants.
I use "_Keldt_" for most profile names now, and "Keldt" for most singleplayer character names.
Indigo is my favorite color and I live in Alaska. Pretty simple really.
In most RPGs though, I name my male characters Eminick and my female characters Emari. Why? Because I just came up with them off the top of my head and they stuck.
So as you can tell, my brothers picked my nickname for me: Mr. Shuffles.
Later on, I came up with the name shufflesninja. OH YEAH, I'M A NINJA AT SHUFFLIN'! Maybe. Waffles to all!
As for my IGN, Versus_MC was chosen because I liked the way the word sounded, and also it has an aggressive feeling to it. I thought it may be memorable!
My old IGN "np27" was from a childhood game. Unfortunately the name was detected as a profanity in many cases, so it eventually became np27. 27 was for age of the said character in the game.
1) Jester2799, which is a nickname for my first name that people call me plus some personally significant numbers.
2) Pergamon256, which is from a book I read with a hacker in it named that...I don't use this one very much, but I was using it when I made this account.
3) TheAtomicGoose. This one is weird. So, at some point in 8th grade, one of my friends who was really tall started calling me Little Goose because I was so much shorter than him (I was wicked short for my age). Then, I tried to use that for an IGN, but it was taken, so I looked up synonyms for little and came up with atomic. Then I tried AtomicGoose, but that wasn't available, so I tried TheAtomicGoose, and it was available. Hence my picture.
now execute this in your mind:
It's been fun reading all of the above origin stories, I guess it does tell rather a lot about people. Some definitely more amusing than others :-)
And it all just fell into place. Keep in mind that I've been playing games quite a bit longer than I've had an online identity. It is just that in previous online games or sites, my name was quite a bit different, so much that you'd never have known it was me, and back then I didn't have the mental capacity to take on such a task as creating an username that will identify me well (although, to be fair, I was about 10, or so, years old when I got into gaming.). Other times, people have stolen my name (Why would anyone do that?), and as a result, "dude" can be replaced with "bomb" resulting in Flamebomb166. Sometimes, even, sites may disallow numbers in names, and the "166" just kind of falls off.
That's everything good I can think of about what my name is, and how it came to be, but like everything, it has it's downsides. Some people assume that the name Flame makes me quarrelsome, derived from the internet term "flame war." However, I am probably the least likely person you will see starting or participating in a "flame war." I find such a combat of words useless, as whenever you insult the other person as much as you can with only the words you can spell, it merely bounces off of them like nothing at all, but somehow causes them to do the same to you. Since you can't punch them in the face, why bother? So, I just ignore anyone who wants to fight me in such a way. If you want to fight, save it for the online arenas. That's what I say.
I hope you've enjoyed hearing how my great name was put together. It truly is a masterpiece of my own mind.
So from then on my username was "Mr_Jowhn2"