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Some backstory. I've never been very inventive with usernames: my recurring choice since I was about thirteen has been "gobcfc", which to most people looks I fell asleep on my keyboard while signing up for MSN Messenger. That's about as cool an explanation as the reality, which is that it means "go Birmingham City FC", but for some reason whenever I have to input a nickname for whatever service/website I'm signing up to, it never occurs to me that other users will most likely read it as "gob fucker" or something. I'll take a long hard long at my antisocial online behaviour shortly, but to continue the trip back in time: MSN Messenger (or Windows Live, as our younger readers now know it). There were certainly enough textual atrocities in that social space to put me off - you can only see so many of your schoolfriends calling themselves a variant of "x_X_$w337_LiL_pRiNcEZZZ_X_x" before you start to recoil in horror. At the very least I suspect those dumb names led me to the conclusion that those who wanted to be known by their online persona boasted just enough brain cells to convince a dog to poo.
Fast forward a whole load of years and of course I can see the genuine advantages of an internet pseudonym. If you play World of Warcraft eighty hours a week, you don't necessarily want your co-workers/prospective employers to catch onto your shameful cyber-heroin addiction. If you're an uncontrollable racist/homophobic/sexist/just plain dickish eternal adolescent, you don't want the pwn-doctor's patients to find out your address from the tea-bag prescriptions you hand out during every session of Halo or Call of Duty. And of course, if you want to be an internet celebrity, you probably won't have much luck standing out from the crowd if your name is James Smith or Chuganlal Suria Motoghan Lad (you can thank my lovely chum
And then you have my online persona, which, for this blog, is just my name. I even went so far in the "About Us" section to say I was "brave enough to use [my] real name" - perhaps "thick enough" would have been more appropriate, particularly if I was scared of work-colleagues uncovering my sordid gaming lifestyle (I'm not) or if I expected to become the next big internet Thing (I certainly don't). I don't think I need to press the point any further: I can't bring myself to self-identify with a nickname, no matter if it's the dumbest or coolest pseudonym I could possibly think of. This quite possibly affects the way I play games as well, manifesting itself as a reluctance to engage with online multiplayer. With the exception of driving games like Trackmania 2 Canyon, or an indulgence in achievement hunting in Red Dead Redemption (a topic for another day), I can hardly ever make myself play the online mode of a game, especially after an in-depth single player experience. Case in point, GTA V: I pumped fifty hours into the story campaign, even collected all of the spaceship parts (not worth it) and could not be convinced by the repeated invitations of my buddies on this blog to dip my toes in the online end of the pool. The weird thing is, I'm not exactly a lone wolf in real life - the silliest aspect of this is that I appear to be a social extrovert living out the online fantasy of being an antisocial loner. It's not intentional, but the fact is that I enjoy isolationist games like Fallout 3 a lot more than any team deathmatch, and the very concept of League of Legends and other MOBA's puts me off for some reason I can't quite articulate.
My fellow bloggers clearly feel differently. Why do they prefer to identify themselves and one another as a random assortment of bad puns and haphazard keyboard mashings? Assuming they read this, I'm hoping they'll straight-up tell me, but I'd like to offer my own theories. Obviously there's the aforementioned need to stand out from the crowd, but I think it goes deeper than that: it's a very human performative urge, even amongst those who, like me, discovered how little acting talent they had in their very first Drama class. We've all been children who pretended to be superheroes or astronauts or footballers or witches/wizards or princes/princesses or British bulldogs (granted, that last one is more like an excuse for ritualised violence) and when we get older and more self-conscious, the internet offers a tantalising opportunity to reinvent oneself, even if everyone else knows who you really are. Feel free to tell me I'm overthinking this, but we all like to laugh and have fun, and manipulating your identity is a core part of that. To my mind, the internet is just a dynamic stage that allows us to do the kind of song and dance we'd be chucked into a mental asylum for performing in the open air. Clearly I'm the idiot here for doing exactly that and permitting the slim chance of an employer googling my name, only to discover that I write blog posts about internet pseudonyms.
I'll wrap this up now, but before I do, in the true style of BFVG I've decided to rate my fellow bloggers' usernames out of 10. (And before any of you try to explain the incredibly clever reference in your tag that I'm too much of a thickie to understand, I don't give a shit. I'm rating these based on a: how well they represent the person in question and b: whether they tickle my punny bone. You'll take your number and like it.)
Arjybarjy: Excellent. Encapsulates his rough-and-tumble lifestyle and turns his real name into a pun that feels like it shouldn't work but does. 9/10
Fingers333: This one's a bit surreal. I prefer to think there's nothing vulgar regarding his sexual prowess behind it, but rather that if Dean was not Dean, he would surely be three hundred and thirty three fingers glued together. It all makes sense. 8/10
Hairwire: I guess hair is important to her and she really likes The Wire? Nice pun on haywire, anyway. 7/10
Kingofallcosmos: Not a pun in sight, but a cool gaming reference at least. In a classic case of projection, I often think that Katamari's King actually resembles Gurdeep, so this name is quite suitable. 7/10
Gnatasha: Sinks my online anonymity theory - I'm not sure you can even call it a pseudonym when your real name makes up 90% of the word. In her defence, Tash is certainly a little thing - in fact I understand some gnats have slightly larger hands than her. 6/10
Yoglaiiiii: This nickname sums up everything about Yogesh's personality. His real name is interesting for the first syllable and then you get bored. Wait, which is his real name? 6/10
Heliosrain: I'm guessing this is some kind of play on "rainbow", but it's way above my pun grade. 5/10
SeaKing61: What an anticlimax. What is he seeking? 61 what? Also, he claims to be king of the sea, but only plays land- and air-based simulators. Wilfully misleading and devious. 4/10
Theris108: Bewildering. I don't know if a "ris" is some kind of West Country lifeform I need to be afraid of or just a dumb Latin joke. Either way I don't like it. 2/10
This_is_jazz: Abominable. It not only makes you hate words, but drags a great genre of music down with it. If I was being generous I'd see this as merely a very poor attempt at a 300 reference, but I think we all know what happened: Felix misspelled "jizz" years ago and is too ashamed to admit it. 0/10
First of all I would like to thank you for giving me such an admirable score! I really think that the only reason that I use an online tag is because evryone else was doing the same when I set up all of my accounts. But the more I think about it the more bizzare I think the whole practice is.
ReplyDeleteIf I were to join a local football team I would not turn up and demand that everyone started calling me Toes666. Although that would be a cool name!