Saturday with Sach: Whats In a Name

In-game names: they define who we are, and how the world knows us. What isn't often explored is, how we get the names we have.



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!

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