Sylphine suffers from a problem that's very close to home for me: her character's name is often pronounced incorrectly by others in game. And while it's close not only because I routinely mangle names on the podcast (both accidentally and sometimes, I'll admit, for comedic purposes), but my own name is of questionable pronounciation. When I was creating my very first character ingame, I was stumbling around for a creative name, and I ended up going with a variation of the word I saw on the "Random" button in front of me: Rande. Truth be told, I have no idea how to pronounce it -- I guess I prefer "Rand" over "Randey," only because the second sounds so close to "Randy," so usually I'll just go what whatever someone says in the game. But I can see Sylphine's issue: it's probably a pain to spend so much time on a name only to have it wrecked daily.

And of course, this epidemic isn't only connected to character names -- being that this is a virtual world where text is the usual form of communication, it's very common to see place names and NPC names mispronounced more often than not.

In the end, you just have to do what I do: try your best and hope you get it right. And from the other side of it, don't be too angry when people mess up your name. There are 12 million of us out there, and nobody's going to get everything right.

Tags: character-names, comedy, ingame-world, names, npc-names, podcast, pronunciation, rande, text, virtual-world

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Fan stuff, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, Humor, NPCs