What's in a name?

Help me out here. We are more or less living in a fantasy world when we sign on to FFXI. It's an escapism for many. A place where we can forget about reality for a short time and be immersed in a wonderful world of make-believe and adventure, where we are limited only by our imagination (and game mechanics).

One of the things that helps create a sense of immersion is the people around you. A bit of role play would be awesome but, I think that's probably more than your average citizen of Vana'diel is willing to participate in. On the other hand, if there is anything that knocks the feeling of immersion in the ground, it is the ridiculous character names that some people have.

Seriously, I have to ask some of you: What the hell were you on when you picked out your name?

There are thousands of people who play this game, so it's understandable that someone might have beat you to the punch when you wanted to pick out the rare name of "John", "Mary", "Jim", or even "Susan". You know what though? There are millions of names to pick, and an infinite amount that you can create. Names are like Legos; you can break them down and add some letters to create something even better.

Noooo, we can't do that. It takes too much thought. Let's just go with xXSephirothXx, or better still, let's just get completely stupid and make our name so long that people will spend the next three hours trying to figure out the pronunciation or remember the spelling.

Why do you people do this? What's so hard about coming up with a name? There are online repositories of names that you can just go to and randomly pick something if your creative genes are a little dormant. You could drop all creativity and use your real name if you wanted to. I'd venture to say that the majority of people you come across wouldn't think twice that it's your real name anyway, and it's even safer for girls because as we all know, girls don't exist on the internet.

This is going to be your online persona for the next week, month, year, or several years that you choose to exist in Vana'diel. It's kind of hard to take someone seriously with a name like MCBubbliciousFisheyes, even if you are wielding relic weaponry and fancy gear.