The Alias

Alias: A-li-as - ey-lee-uhs
Adverb: Used to indicate that a named person is also known or more familiar under another specified name.

What is my name again? ScarZy? Vieral? Octavian? Marcus Antonius? Tsumugi?

I could go on and on, and that is the beauty of gaming aliases, I can morph, I can adapt; nobody has one name. We can change it completely, or we can change it slightly by putting some funky numbers or punctuation in. Any of us can have one, any of us can have many. We can become new people, become different people: erase history.
There are lots of types of nick names; think back, how did you get yours? My main alias for instance was given to me by a player known as Hillzy, who is now a Grime artist here in Manchester. My original nick name, Scar – which I used with various punctuation and numerical variations - was taken here on Crossfire and so instead I decided that I would choose ‘Scarzy’ instead. It sort of went from there. There are many ways you can get your alias, some are just typed out like mine as a username to a certain website and they stick, others use their birth names, and maybe add something slightly different to it, some examples are: Ross, Fredd Carlos Kevin.

Others decide to use their real-life nicknames and use them in the gaming world, this decreases anonymity which could be an issue for certain dark corners of the vast internet, but we are humble gamers, we do not have to hide. Again, examples of this are Meez, Ollie. These are usually childhood nick names, or last names changed slightly.

How do we remember so many names? Because we see them everywhere: we see them on IRC, we see them on ET, we see them on Crossfire, or we see them in ac_listplayers. Seeing names this often lets you remember them easier, and besides, we all know that a highlight is a text way to shout someone.

Then there are the numbers. I am known on here, I am known on other online communities, and I usually always use the same nick name. How many people know me in total? I have no clue, but I am quite confident that it would be a number over a thousand. I have to then contrast that to how many people know me in person, how many people know my name, and how many people I actually know back. This number must be must smaller. I am still quite young and I simply have not had the same scope as I have online. Online one can easily navigate around various social groups and never have to stay. Whether it be gaming media websites, hardware websites, peripheral websites, you have the potential to be a different person on each one. Networking online is easy and enjoyable. As I stated in my previous column you can easily network with people that can give you fantastic benefits, you can gain trust and gain fantastic friends, maybe even a friend with benefits.

There are also places that I am not known as ScarZy at all, instead I am known as other names, this is usually on different IRC servers where you want to be anonymous (no, I am not a part of some weird arse anime-linux-nerd irc channel where we talk about hentai all day long). I could, in theory, spoof and IP here and create an account with an awful alias like HugTheSub and go around acting like a general retard, scrutinizing people for writing columns as I sit there all day do absolutely nothing productive, nor constructive. I could have spoofed PB GUIDs and cheated my face off then return as innocent as a kitten to play a Clanbase game the next day. I would not, but I could.

Would you respond to them? Most of us being gamers have use some sort of VoIP service like TS3, Ventrilo, we are called by our aliases most of the time unless they are friends in real life and then they usually resort to the name in which they first addressed each other. One of my best friends sometimes throws in ‘ScarZy’ instead of my birth name, do I respond to this? Of course I do! I respond automatically like he had said my actually legal name, and that freaks them out; but this is how it is on LAN, and this is how I am known to most of you guys. I probably wouldn’t respond to them all, no. I haven’t had to, most of the other ones have been text based.

What is the point of this column? Not much, really. I like you to think about things, where it started, your gaming history and to share memories. I like the idea of you being known as some whacky alias, something that you can respond to and if you heard someone else say it in person; you would feel weird as you look up. Just remember where you got it, and remember these times that you would spend endless hours tracking that guy in a different country, setup, config, gamestyle, and moreover, alias.