I like being able to name things and I don’t understand why more games don’t let you do it. As I was playing LotRO yesterday, I noticed that I now have the option to name my mount. Hm… I thought. I’ll name her Faria, because my dwarf would ride a mare. I didn’t put much thought into the name but, somehow, it seemed right.
Today, on a whim, I changed the name to another I’d used in a short story I wrote recently. For some reason, it didn’t seem to sit right. It wasn’t her name. She was Faria. So I changed it back.
Naming things allows us to take ownership of them, even inanimate objects, or, in this case, pixels on a screen. It’s the nature of language. We become endeared to things we name because, in the instant we assign them their sign, they take on a personal meaning to us. My horse went from being “a” horse to “my” horse. It’s the same way in which the word “tree” has more meaning than “the green and brown thing that grows out of the ground.” Tree takes on a meaning different from the simplicity or its definition. Believe it or not, this is me apply literary theory to MMOs. Literary theory I absolutely loathe, actually.
Anyways, that’s my thought as I wound down my playtime before class this morning. Why don’t more games let you name your pets? In WoW, hunters can but Warlocks cannot. Their imps shall forever remain “Imp” and nothing more. Maybe that’s why the hunter class always seemed more endearing to me.
And, on that note, I’m off to a Poetry Workshop where I’m submitting a poem lamenting literary theory. Yeah. It’s been a bad week in Critical Approaches to Literature.
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