Please Don't Ask My Name

If you ask me my name, I’ll tell you that it’s Noah. You can see as much on this post’s byline. I would prefer you refer to me by that name as opposed to whatever username I may have on social media. Despite this, I have some admittedly unconventional views about names in video games. I don’t particularly want my own name showing up in a video game.

If a game asks me to create a character, it only makes sense to give them a name. I don’t have much of a problem with this. For one thing, I don’t need to use my name. I can call them whatever I want. There is a bit of an issue when it comes to what other characters in the game will call the character. In a game without voice acting, any name is fine as long as it doesn’t exceed a set character limit, doesn’t contain unusual characters, doesn’t contain any naughty words, and doesn’t contain any words incorrectly interpreted as naughty (my condolences to the people of Scunthorpe). Some games may set additional limits to exclude names already in use by major characters in the game, but that’s less common. At the end of the day, all the game needs to do is spit out a string.

Games that do include voice acting need a bit more work. The name can appear in text without issue, but being spoken out loud proves to be a challenge when the number of possible names is astronomically high. One common approach is to use the name in writing but replace the name in the voiced dialogue with something more general like “him” or “that guy” or various other neutral descriptors. This can result in very clumsy dialogue. Another approach is to give the character some sort of title that other characters can use separate from their name, like the Chosen Undead in Dark Souls or the Arisen in Dragon’s Dogma. Perhaps this form of address is impersonal, but it’s far less clunky, and in games with a created protagonist, impersonal is often fine.

What about games that don’t have created protagonists? If the protagonist is a total blank slate with virtually no identity to speak of (see Pokémon), I suppose there isn’t an issue. Yet there are plenty of games that have characters with predefined appearances, personalities, and backstories that still ask for a name to be entered. This is a complete character, and all they’re missing is a name. The responsibility falls on me to choose it.

Why do games do this? The simple answer is that the player can enter their own name and therefore feel a greater affinity with the protagonist. Personally, I don’t have a lot of interest in projecting myself onto the protagonists of video games for much the same reason I don’t want to project myself onto the protagonists of any other form of narrative. I don’t want an insular experience defined around myself, I want to experience something new and different, and that entails identifying with someone other than myself. Not every game is character-driven, which is when created characters become viable. But in a character-centric game, we should not be downplaying the character’s identity. Even for those who want to project their own identity onto the protagonist, they’ll have a hard time doing so when so much of the work has already been done. It just seems to be a poor decision.

Some long-running series that once made use of character naming have since dropped it. In The Legend of Zelda, it was customary to begin the game by naming the green-capped protagonist. This was despite the manuals, promotional materials, and in some cases even the subtitles of the games making it very clear that his name is Link. When he appeared in Super Smash Bros, rather than calling him something generic like Hero of Time, they called him Link. In the animated series and the manga adaptations, his name is Link. And now, in more recent games like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, his name is Link. Zelda addresses our hero, out loud, by his own name. Nintendo finally dispensed with the notion of naming the player character, in large part because they finally adopted prominent voice acting. I’m sure other factors were at play in this decision. Perhaps Nintendo had access to telemetry that indicated Link was the name most commonly entered by players. Perhaps it was merely a marketing strategy to keep all of their different brands on the same page. No matter the reason, it’s hard not to think this isn’t how it always should have been.

Final Fantasy went through a similar history, albeit at an accelerated pace. Some of the early Final Fantasy games, notable the original and III, featured totally anonymous party members who were named by the player. Final Fantasy II was the first of the series to have party members who could correctly be referred to as characters, and to that end they did have official names, although the original release of the game left this up to the player. Later games would give the player the freedom to rename party members, although the name entry screen had their official names filled in by default. Final Fantasy X was the first in the series to feature voice acting, and that necessitated removing the ability to rename party members, save for the main protagonist. Again, the name Tidus was filled in by default, but in spoken dialogue, it is never said. During the game’s ending, I couldn’t shake the idea that Yuna never actually learned his name and would spend the rest of her life reminiscing about “that Blitzball player from Zanarkand". Final Fantasy XI, being an MMO, featured character creation, but XII eliminated the naming of party members for good, at least in the offline flagship games. Again, where the characters always had official names, it seems foolish to pretend they should be called anything else. No matter what name I enter, I will always see Cloud Strife as Cloud Strife. He has a unique appearance, a backstory, and a personality. It’s only logical that he also has a name.

All of this brings me to the series that’s been on my mind the whole article. Perhaps you’ve caught on, but perhaps you haven’t. This post, while discussing games in general terms and using various examples, is about Persona. Every time I start a Persona game, I feel the need to pull out my phone and look up what the main character’s name is supposed to be. It’s not hard; Atlus always put out a lot of supplementary materials in support of each game like manga/anime adaptations and spin-off games, and those usually have an official name they chose for the protagonist (sometimes more than one, which makes things a bit confusing). In more recent releases, the official names even appear in-game, albeit as a fallback in the event the player changes the game’s text language. All of this is to say that the protagonist of Persona 5 is obviously named Ren Amamiya, and I’m not about to pretend otherwise. Dialogue isn’t too clunky in-game because the other Phantom Thieves can just call him Joker most of the time, but the ability to rename the protagonist seems utterly superfluous at this point. I’m never going to see this guy as myself, so why use my name? He clearly has a name already, so why use any other?

At best, name entry doesn’t actually offer much. If the protagonist could have any name, they just as easily could have no name at all. Perhaps seeing the player’s own name gives a brief endorphin jolt, but it’s well worth examining whether or not this outweighs the drawbacks associated with name entry. If the drawbacks are negligible, knock yourself out. But when you start creating problems for yourself out of a misguided effort to create immersion, it’s time to start rethinking.