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What's in a name?: naming practices in online video games

Published: 19 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Recent research suggests that participation in online video games allows players to create an "idealized self" through their characters, that is, a character perceived to be more attractive or interesting than the player. However, our research indicates that players use carefully created character names to develop a persistent, pragmatic identity to maintain social relationships across games and related sites, and to express their personalities by incorporating elements of popular culture, literary references, and aspects of their own personal histories. Identity in gaming is thus more complex than identification with the physical representation of the character.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI PLAY '14: Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on Computer-human interaction in play
    October 2014
    492 pages
    ISBN:9781450330145
    DOI:10.1145/2658537
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 19 October 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. handles
    2. identity
    3. names
    4. online video games
    5. player-character relationship

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    CHI PLAY '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 104 submissions, 29%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 421 of 1,386 submissions, 30%

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    Cited By

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    • (2023)"Creepy Towards My Avatar Body, Creepy Towards My Body": How Women Experience and Manage Harassment Risks in Social Virtual RealityProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100277:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
    • (2023)“To be or Not to be Me?”: Exploration of Self-Similar Effects of Avatars on Social Virtual Reality ExperiencesIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2023.332024029:11(4794-4804)Online publication date: Nov-2023
    • (2023)Stories of names: exploring Chinese high school language-other-than-English learners’ foreign name(s) usage and its role in multilingual identity constructionJournal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development10.1080/01434632.2023.2170392(1-15)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2023
    • (2021)Me, Myself, and Not-I: Self-Discrepancy Type Predicts Avatar Creation StyleFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0190211Online publication date: 15-Jan-2021
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    • (2021)Protect and ProjectProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34492335:CSCW1(1-19)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2021
    • (2020)Gaming the NameProceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3410404.3414259(120-131)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2020
    • (2020)Ice Paddles, CO2 Invaders, and Exploding Planets: How Young Students Transform Climate Science Into Serious GamesProceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3410404.3414256(534-548)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2020
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