You’ve got a new char­ac­ter for a big mas­sively mul­ti­player game, so you need a name. How do you come up with a good name? Good ques­tion! I might write about that another time.

This is a list of what peo­ple do wrong. It was writ­ten with both a genero-fantasy set­ting and a stan­dard Eng­lish key­board in mind.

(Higher on list is less bad, lower on list is less good.)

• Generic names: Dragon. Angel. Valor.
• “For­eign” Lan­guage words: Grande. Iki­masho. (For­eign to you is not for­eign to all–you’d laugh at a char­ac­ter whose name was “Big” or “Let’s go!”)
• Jammed words: Drag­o­nan­gel. Burningcat.
• Meta: An undead named Rot­ting. A tau­ren named Beefcake.
• Out of game con­text (OOC): Chuck. Spaceship.
• Uno­rig­i­nal: Lego­las. Drizzt.
• Jammed and meta: Deathknight.
• Jammed and OOC: Chuc­knor­ris. Brucewil­lis. Captainplanet.
• Jammed and meta and OOC: Undead­fred.
• Jammed and talk­ing to the reader: Ucantseeme. Pwnyou. Imdeath. (Per­son­ally, I always choose the most obtuse nick­name pos­si­ble for these kind of names: “See you later, Imd.” “My nick­name is sup­posed to be Death <cry>”)
• Uno­rig­i­nal and late: Lle­go­lass. Driiiiiiizzt.
• Uno­rig­i­nal and late and jammed: Elfle­go­las. Deathknightt.
• Pre­scrip­tion drug name: Prope­cia. Celexa. (Although given enough time, pharma could elim­i­nate the genero-fantasy namespace)
• Swapped char­ac­ters: Dragòn. (pre­vi­ously dis­cussed: Text-based game, yet I can­not type your name.)
• Uno­rig­i­nal and swapped: Lêgolâs.
• Uno­rig­i­nal and swapped and late: Elflê­golâs.
• Polit­i­cal state­ments of any kind: Nobama. Mclame. (Your polit­i­cal views are unin­ter­est­ing in a game context.)
• Jammed and talk­ing to reader and swapped: Üçântsêêmê.

The order of these gets hairy in the mid­dle and is to taste, although I feel pretty solid about the top and bottom.

Thanks to the read­ers who helped with ideas.

Did I for­get any­thing? Is there a name worse than Üçântsêêmê?