How Nicknames Shape Our Digital Identity
Christmas 1999, a young boy was staring at the large CRT monitor. He needs to fill in a nickname to be able to play the game he had seen his brothers play the night before. He was about to enter a new unexplored world: online gaming. The boy sitting behind the family computer was thinking while soft mechanical noises came from within the computer. Thinking he was very creative, he named himself after the game he was about to play, Unreal Tournament. He decided upon the nickname Unrealer. It sounded badass and would surely make him look cool, he thought. So, the nickname was born, and the legacy began. Over the following years, he changed his nickname many times, spanning many games, but always a variant of the first one he had chosen all those years ago.
Does this sound familiar to you? Did you also stick with your original, or variants of your, nickname? Perhaps you changed it because you were embarrassed by being known as the person with some generic nickname, or maybe you named yourself after a famous movie character? I encountered many people named Neo, Morpheus or Agent Smith back then. There is nothing wrong with those nicknames, but time does make us rethink our choices. A more common change of nickname is the setting of the online world you are about to embark into. Naming my first ever World of Warcraft character, Unrealer, would not have felt right for my level…
