作者：Philippa Warr

着眼于你在eSports中发现的玩家代号和在线句柄，并搜索能够最快让你感到头痛的最佳方法——乍一看，存在一个让人眼花缭乱的变量。

但可能也会有一个新兴模式，这是我们从未看过的。有些研究者会保持着乐观的态度并开始深入研究许多大写字母，带有下划线或者随机数字去判断是否存在任何方式能够与玩家在游戏中的表现，或者他们受到吸引的类别相关联，而他们最初得到的结论可能会让你大吃一惊。

《英雄联盟》的Reginald这一名字的选择便让那些不愿输给名为Reginald的人的玩家感到郁闷——但是一个更具攻击性的名字是否会让敌人觉得自己面对着更大的威胁？在《魔兽争霸2》的粉丝心中，让Arteezy去攻击粉丝是否比单纯基于名字的复杂性简单得多？或者，如果两个人在不同的游戏中使用同一的名字是否将他们与一个特殊的种族或类别联系在一起？就像在《魔兽争霸2》叫Fear是否合适，或者这一名字只是为了吓唬我们而已？

Rafet Sifa，Anders Drachen以及Christian Thurau在为《Journal of Entertainment Computing》所写的文章中说道：“调查玩家于在线（或离线）游戏中所选择的名字，即他们的在线身份，是一种直接价值，因为这将告诉人们谁在玩这些游戏。”通过着眼于命名规格以及玩家如何使用并对它们做出回应，这里所存在的理念便是这将可能通过他们的玩家代号和句柄对玩家进行分析，同时还能够为非玩家角色调整名字的使用。

研究者表示：“为了分析玩家属性而调查名字是作者能够获得的最佳信息，这是一种具有创造性的方法，名字的挖掘可能对于玩家分析来说是有价值的，并且不考虑任何特殊的目的（游戏邦注：包括研究，社区管理，网络安全以及设计评价等等）。”

从本质上来看，通过了解玩家的名字你便能够判断他/她的游戏风格和性格，从而对此作出回应。

如果你将eSports暂时搁于一旁并着眼于像《魔兽世界》这样的游戏，即你期待能够在特定领域看到一款特殊游戏，那么这便是帮助你进行分析的一种简单方法。这意味着研究者可以贯穿某些领域去寻找模式和常见的名字。

Thuraau和Drachen写了一篇关于《魔兽世界》中的角色名字的模式和启示的文章，并从中发现了一些内容。首先便是角色命名策略将受到你所使用的服务器的影响，所以角色扮演服务器将提供给你比玩家vs玩家或玩家vs环境服务器更多不同类型的角色名字。还有一个发现便是名字会像在现实世界那样遵循着同样的分布类型。

着眼于不同种族间的不同名字，特殊的名字将与特殊的角色类型相联系，并在某一种族间更常出现。通过了解角色的名字你便可以判断他们是会选择半兽人，矮人或者人类。

最后，这两个人还注意到，比起带有正面元素的名字，他们更倾向于那些带有负面元素的名字（如“噩梦”）—-研究者推测这可能与游戏内部的冲突有关。

你可能开始注意到这与具有竞争性的多人游戏间的关系以及为什么它如此重要。如果你只是知道一个玩家的名字能够传达他们的特殊优势或者他们想要游戏的方式，这便有可能影响你在战斗中如何面对他们，并且不需要观看他们如何游戏。同样地，选择一个具有正面意义或者具有优势的名字可能会影响团队成员和敌人对你的回应。

我们总是很难去研究像第一人称射击游戏这样的游戏。玩家代号或句柄是与用户账号维系在一起而不是角色，所以它们必须在整款游戏中具有独特性，而不只是在特殊区域里。这意味着你不能只是判断哪个名字反复与某个玩家类别或性能相联系。

相反地，研究者着眼于《战地：叛逆连队2》，《荣誉勋章》和《孤岛危机2》的玩家名字的数据基础，并使用一个字符串集群技术为同样类型的名字分类。让我们以《战地：叛逆连队2》为例，在此你可以找到像MaliciousMaulr，xonacaox，Ankur，Daniel08，InSaNe_x_ChAoZz, Craybell以及Acid_Snake等名字。研究者使用了一个公共的第三方数据追踪器（Player Stats Network）去识别哪个类别的玩家获得最高分数（突击兵，工程师，医生或侦察兵），然后尝试着检测该类别是如何影响玩家代号。在这个例子中他们未能发现任何重要的关系。

但选择不同的行为属性，如刺客（玩家擅长不牺牲自己而杀死别人）和目标傀儡（玩家擅长不牺牲自己而折磨别人）都呈现了玩家代号和技能间具有更强大的关系。“至少对于《战地：叛逆连队2》来说，游戏风格相比类别选择来说是更好的代号选择指示器，”这便是研究者所得出的结论。

玩家代号或游戏用户名研究领域还处于开始阶段，为了获得更加明确的结论我们还需要进行更深入的研究。而一些相关领域将会为我们的某些研究提供一个有效的起点。市场营销部门便是一个很棒的例子。

Adam Alter是纽约大学斯特恩商学院的一名市场营销副教授。在最近为《纽约客》撰写的一篇文章中他解释了为什么“人们通常都不愿意多想，并且他们更倾向于选择容易发音与容易理解的对象，人，产品和单次。”他在文章中的讨论涉及到股票，品牌，政治家，但因为专业的游戏会投入许多钱去思考团队名字和个体玩家代号，所以它们便具有了财政意义。

说到简单的名字所具有的吸引力，Alter告诉我们：“我想，当人们在回想其他占领了同样游戏领域的玩家时，简单的名字将会更让人印象深刻且更容易识别。我们应该没遇过一个简单的名字对一名玩家或一支团队造成伤害的情况，但是却经常遇到带有复杂玩家代号的玩家被遗失在众多名字中的情况。”

smite(from redbull)

换句话说，如果人们更倾向于简单且容易发音的名字，并且你的团队的名字刚好就属于这类型，你们便能够更轻松地吸引人们的注意力。显然，即使这样也不可能推翻无聊的游戏玩法或糟糕的运动精神等坏名声，但却有可能降低你在网上组建追随者的难度，这也能够用于鼓舞士气并销售活动门票或商品，所以这就像是职业选手所作出的回应一样。

许多玩家代号和在线句柄都是个人的，有时候只是内部的笑话或人称代词，有时候是以前的错号的演化，有时候是为了一个论坛或角色而选择的一个用户名。开发者操作多人竞争游戏的方式也意味着其中的名字通常是独特的并且是与账号文件夹绑定在一起，而不是游戏中不同角色的代码那样。结果便是，即使是特定的用户名在某种情况下也会特别有用，你可能会希望玩家会为了适应它们而抛弃早前的自我。

但随着现在的eSports会时不时提供奖励去推动数百万美元的代号，任何可能提示团队偏好的信息都将具有价值。如果研究能够取得成功，那么关于“用户名意味着什么？”的问题将成为团队策略的一大重要组成部分。如果我们用其它名字换掉7ckngMad可能就不那么亲切了。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

What’s in a username? The power of gamertags

By Philippa Warr

Looking at the lists of gamertags and online handles you find in eSports and searching for patterns might seem like the best way to give yourself a headache quickly – at a glance, there’s a bewildering variety.

But there might be a pattern emerging, one none of us ever saw coming. Some researchers are more optimistic and have started dipping their toes into the pool of capital letters, underscores and seemingly-random numbers to see if there are any ways they relate to how players behave in games or the classes and races they gravitate towards and their initial conclusions may surprise you.

League of Legends’ Reginald picked his name to irk enemy players assuming no-one wants to lose to someone named Reginald – but would a more aggressive name cause foes to assume he’s an even bigger threat? Within the realms of Dota 2 fandom, is it easier for Arteezy to attract fans than aabBAA solely based on the complexity of their names? Or, if the pair used the same names in a different game could they be inadvertently associating themselves with a particular race or class? Is Fear that good at Dota 2, or does his name just scare us into thinking so?

“Investigating the names chosen by players in online (or offline) games – their online identities – is of direct value because it informs about the people who play these games,” say Rafet Sifa, Anders Drachen and Christian Thurau in a paper written for the Journal of Entertainment Computing. By looking at naming conventions and how players use and react to them, the idea is that it would be possible to create behaviour profiles of players from their gamertags and handles as well as adapting how names are used for non-player characters.

“Investigating names for the purpose of player profiling is, to the best knowledge of the authors, a novel approach,” say the researchers. However, “name-mining may prove valuable to player profiling, irrespective of the specific purpose (research, community management, cybersecurity, design evaluation etc).”

Essentially, by knowing a gamer’s name you might be able to make judgements about his or her play style and temperament and counter them.

It’s an easier prospect to get your head around if you leave eSports to one side for a moment and look at a game like World of Warcraft, where you’re only expected to have a unique name on a particular realm. That means that researchers can crawl through collections of realms to look for patterns and common names.

Thurau and Drachen wrote a paper on patterns and inspirations for character names in World of Warcraft and found several things. One is that the character naming strategies appear to be affected by the type of server you’re playing on, so role-playing servers give you different types of character name than you’d see on Player-vs-Player or Player-vs-Environment servers. Another observation was that the names follow the same type of distribution as names in the real world.

Looking at how the names split up between different races, particular names tend to get associated with particular types of characters and crop up more often for one race than for another. By knowing the name of a character you can then work out the likelihood that they are an orc or a dwarf or a human.

Finally, the pair noted that names with a negative slant to them (like ‘Nightmare’) were six times more common than those with a positive slant – something the researchers speculate is related to the emphasis on conflict within the game.

You can start to see how this relates to competitive multiplayer and why it might be important. If just knowing a player’s name can tell you about their particular strengths or the way they tend to play, it could affect how you approach them in combat without you needing to have watched them play. Similarly, picking a name which is associated with positive qualities or one which comes across as dominant might affect how team-mates and foes respond to you.

It’s harder to investigate games like first person shooters, though. The gamertag or handle is tied to the user’s account rather than an avatar and so they must be unique across the entire game rather than within a single realm. That means you can’t just see which names repeatedly connect with which player classes or perform better as particular factions.

Instead the researchers looked at databases of player names from Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Medal of Honor and Crysis 2 and used a string clustering technique to group similar types of name. Let’s take BFBC2, where you find usernames like MaliciousMaulr, x6naca6x, Ankur, Daniel08, InSaNe_x_ChAoZz, Craybell, and Acid_Snake. The researchers used a public third-party stats tracker (the Player Stats Network) to identify which class the player scored highest with (assault, engineer, medic or recon) and then attempted to examine how the class affected the gamertags. In that instance they didn’t find any significant relationship.

But picking different behaviour profiles like assassins (players who are good at killing others without dying themselves) and target dummies (who are good at feeding kills to others without actually doing much killing themselves) showed off a far stronger relationship between clusters of gamertags and skills. “For BFBC2 at least, play-style is a better indicator of tag choice than [class] selection,” was the conclusion of the researchers.

The field of gamertag or game username research is at the very beginning of its lifespan and further research will be needed in order to draw any firm conclusions. However, related fields may offer a decent starting point for some of that research. The marketing sector is one such example.

Adam Alter is associate professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business. In a recent article for the New Yorker he explained how “people generally prefer not to think more than necessary, and they tend to prefer objects, people, products, and words that are simple to pronounce and understand”. His discussion in the article relates to stocks, brands and politicians, but with the amount of money being directed at professional gaming thinking of team names and individual gamertags as brands makes financial sense.

Speaking about the attraction of simple names, Alter told Red Bull “I’d imagine that simpler names are more memorable, more recognisable, and easier to repeat mentally when people are thinking of the other players who occupy the same gamescape. It’s hard to think of a time when a simpler name would hurt a gamer or a team, but easy to imagine that gamers with very complex gamertags might get lost in the mass of names.”

In other words, if people gravitate towards the simple and the easy to pronounce it might be easier to generate fandoms if your team has names which fall into that category. Obviously it’s unlikely to override a reputation for terrible gameplay or poor sportsmanship but findings like this could potentially lower the difficulty of building up a following online which can then be used both for building morale – and also for selling tickets to events or merchandise supporting both players and teams, which can be every bit as important to a pro gamer’s career as their twitch reflexes.

Many gamertags and online handles are personal, sometimes in-jokes or personal references, sometimes evolutions of earlier nicknames, sometimes a username chosen for a forum or avatar elsewhere which has become part of that person’s identity. The way the developers operate multiplayer competitive games also means that the names are generally unique and tied specifically to the account holder rather than one of a number of different characters within a game. As a result, even if certain usernames were found to be more useful in some way you might struggle to get players to ditch their older digital selves in order to adopt them.

But with eSports events now regularly offering prize pools nudging over the million dollar mark, any information which could tip the competition in a team’s favour is of value. If the research bears fruit, the question of ‘What’s in a username?’ could become a significant part of a team’s strategy. That which we call a 7ckngMad by any other name may well not smell as sweet.(source:redbull)