How to Make The Moniker That’s Right For You

Username, Gamer Tag, PSNID, Steam Name, call it what you want. They all serve the same purpose in the gaming world. They are a unique identifier to make you stand out as an individual amongst the myriad of other gamers. When adding someone to a friends list you’ll pluck them out of a large list of others or enter it character by character manually. It is for these reasons that I think online IDs should be created with love and care. Not reckless abandon. A throwaway Gamertag labels a throwaway gamer.

It is for this reason that I thought I should put together a small guide on creating the perfect online ID.

To begin with let us establish some ground rules. We’ll be following a convention similar to that of Xbox LIVE. We’re allowed 15 alphanumeric (a-z, 0-9) characters including spaces. Why 15? Because it’s a nice multiple of five is why. Ten seems too short and twenty is too long.

My own is a very poor example. It was born out of some unfunny word-play (You alright? Nah, I’m half left) and the misunderstanding that it could be easily changed. It only started being used heavily after I used it as my LIVE Gamertag (which costs Microsoft space bux to change) and now it’s tied to me in various cubby holes of the Internet. Conveniently enough for me a Google search is useless because of the generic nature of it. Crap humour aside, it has no meaning and is awkward to type out in a sentence. Most people end up hyphenating it to clear things up, which is understandable.

Your ID should contain words that conveys semantic meaning of SOME kind. So choose a word that means something to you. Do you like sniper classes in first person shooters for example? If you do you should definitely have that in your ID. Another good word to use is some version of the word ‘own’ as this shows that you are a good player and a challenge for any opponent. ‘Ownage’ and ‘Pwnage’ are good choices also.

Aesthetics are a thing often overlooked when people settle on their Gamertags or PSNIDs. But not here. Symmetry is something us fleshy humans seem to love and luckily for us, of the available characters there are many that can help us in this regard. Many letters will work for us such a ‘I’ or ‘O’, but the most popular pre and suffix is the letter ‘X’. Rather understandably, too. ‘xX Sniper Pwnage Xx’ for example. It’s spectacular is it not? Unfortunately it is four characters too long. Dropping the spaces buy us another three but that’s still not enough. This is where we drop the vowels.

‘xXSniprPwnageXx’

Perfect. Now we can spend some time fine-tuning the aesthetics of the piece. To make it more striking we can alternate between upper-case and lower-case characters and end up with;

‘xXSnIpRpWnAgEXx’

Marvellous. Remember: Your ID doesn’t have to use the words sniper or ownage or any mutation of the two. In fact they shouldn’t. I decided to check on the example we’ve been using and it seems some clever clogs has beaten us to it. Be creative and use words that mean something to you. Are you a sexy girl? Then perhaps ‘xXSeXiGrL69Xx’ is more appropriate. Do you enjoy playing Major League Gaming ruleset games? Then perhaps something along the lines of ‘xXxMLG MaStAxXx’ would be a good choice.

I hope that I’ve been a great hand in helping you uncreative and uneducated types come up with something you can tie to your online persona. Nowadays, what with social networking, it’s much easier to carry one around with you from site to site than to have a plethora of tags. That and it’s a farce trying to remember them all.