User name epithets...
I find the way in which communities self-organise totally fascinating - almost as fascinating as I find those situations where communities fail to self-organise. I always wonder what went wrong?, when really I should be asking what went right in the successful communities. It's not at all an obvious thing that if you give people a highly structured space which truncates whole swathes of interactions that they'll all turn into a utopian group of productive, collaborative citizens...
On Barbelith Underground - a community that I've been running for years now (with development help from Cal Henderson), we decided to allow everyone to change their displayed user-name as and when they wanted. Obviously confusion emerged initially as unhelpful people changed their handles at the drop of a penny. But gradually a consensus emerged - core identities became acknowledged but with florid epithets all around them. So a man who started as Tannhauser moves towards Haus as his core identity, with his name displayed on the board as (currently) The little Haus in the Priory. Each user seems to find a phrase that they identity with (in time), but then they recontextualise it as and when they want...
In Ancient Greek poetry, poets used epithets to make names fit the metrical patterns they composed within. So Hera became "White-Armed" in one place, and "Ox-eyed" elsewhere. Dawn (Eos), when she appears over the battelfield can be - but does not need to be - rododaktylos (rosy-fingered). These were stock-phrases, but they were also highly descriptive. Sometimes they reflected local variations in cultic origins or stories. But they all represented interesting and different facets of the divinity, hero or commoner...
If I was building Barbelith again, I wouldn't recommend totally flexible displayed-user-names. But I'd want to capture some of the variety and richness of the world of the epithet. I'd get people to express a core identity (Haus, for example) from the beginning, but I'd also let them change their epithets (before and after their names) on the fly as and when they wanted to... It's a simple way with members of a long-standing community - to pay respect to the way that human beings (over time) can be many things and yet also always themselves...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Hi. I guess your proposed solution is very much like instant messenger platforms which maintain independence between an individual's username and their screen name. Every user can change their screen name as they wish -- but their username is fixed for the life of the account (for example, with Yahoo or MSNM it's user@somewhere.com or with ICQ it's a unique number).
→ Posted by: Adam at May 1, 2003 5:03 PM
Not really - the important thing is to make people identifiable to one another as well as to the system itself. So it's kind of like having a login name of Haus and then being able to choose what comes before and after it - so you could be visible as "The Haus of Cards" or "Dougie "Hauser". Everyone knows who you are, but you have boundaries of self expression around it...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at May 1, 2003 5:16 PM
On MUDs you usually keep the same [character] name, but are allowed to change the title displayed after it, and you can also change other attributes. In comparison to MUDs, i find other communities like chat-rooms and most message boards 'dodgy', because people can make up new identities and change their names as they please. I prefer consistency.
→ Posted by: anita at May 1, 2003 6:11 PM
That's a very interesting comment and one that ties in very well with my ideas surrounding how social networks are handled in games versus how they're handled in more discussion-based fora. Thanks for that...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at May 1, 2003 11:47 PM
The MUD I played on for a while allowed "prefixes", eg, a character called Fleet, who had acheived the level of Necromancer, was displayed as "Fleet the funky Necromancer", "funky" being her prefix. This MUD, though, did not allow players to define their own prefixes; they had to choose them, and then a wizard (admin) would apply it if they thought it suitable. Thing is; players had to promise to stay in character. If they were "sneaky", they should play sneaky, and use the ACT functions to act sneaky. So a degree of in-characterness was required BY the prefix, and at the same time character was provided by the prefix. Bit of give and take. Prefixes were also fixed, not flexible, but I liked the idea that you had to live up to what you'd chosen rather than chopping and changing as some of us do on Barbelith. (Incidentally, Fleet also had a suffix; when in a room with hir, the line "Fleet the funky necromancer is here, with a huge afro" would bne displayed. She remained in character rather well.)
→ Posted by: taj at May 1, 2003 11:59 PM
On the whole, I hate it when people can change their names to something completely different without reference to the original. I too like at least a modicum of consistency...or at least some natural form of evolution. I have found that people usually like to shorten their names/screennames as others do it for them. I'm actually really bad at condensing peoples names to just one or two characters. In fact my own screenname 's3d' originally came from a chat room avatar I chose randomly one day called 'sea dreamer'. The '3' appeared for a forum that didn't allow for spacing and then I ended up condensing my own name anyway. It comes with its many drawbacks though, as I frequently get approached by gamers and 'l33t' who insist on talking gibberish at me. For the record, my name is Sam, I have a life (if only a very small life) and I do not communicate with the mothership more than once a week...
→ Posted by: s3d at May 2, 2003 2:36 PM