In its most primitive form, an avatar is just a handle, or “nick” to use IRC terminology. In other words, just a name. The name is in fact one of the first elements to be removed from avatars when designers of muds start getting more creative. Many muds, when they evolve out of standard codebases, start replacing the standard descriptions of people:

John is here.

with more descriptive tags based on physical characteristics:

A tall dark man with horrible scars is here.

This then requires the observing player to either recognize the description and tie it to a name, or to examine the player more closely in order to ascertain the name. Some proposed designs go even further, allowing all names perceived by a player to be completely relative and arbitrary. Under such a system, we have no global namespace—a given name is in the perceiver’s eyes. Global namespace is a term ripped from programming, of course. However, it has interesting and special characteristics for mud design. Whereas one player might see:

John has arrived from the west.

another might have encountered John before and stored a custom tag for him, resulting in output like:

The jerk who tried to hit on me has arrived from the west.

This has interesting possibilities for the future, when it is likely that the large scale of online communities will demand “tickler files” of similar design, even if the global namespace remains intact.

Unique names are another issue related to the global namespace. Most muds actually store individual player’s data files indexed off the name. Thus, the requirement for unique names arises from a basic architectural decision in the server. They serve as invaluable tracking tools for the mud admin and also for other players—in fact, arguably they are more important to the other players than to the admin, because admins generally have other methods of identifying a particular player. Much of the communications infrastructure of a typical mud relies on unique names; when you need to send a message to a player remotely, the means for doing so is to send it to the unique tag you have for them: their name.

Constancy in names is vital to players for more than interface reasons. Without it, there can be no semblance whatsoever of social transmission of information regarding the behavior of fellow avatars. Without this reputation-based curb on behavior, avatars are likely to run amok.[1] The stigma of violating social codes falls away if true anonymity is available. Hence many thinkers in the field refer to the threshold as being pseudonymity.[2] This is similar to a handle on CB radio: nobody may know your real name, but you are sufficiently tied to the handle you use that it can establish a reputation of its own, and you can come to value it as much as you value your name in the real world. And indeed, one can see the instances of pseudonymity having taken root in players’ minds when they make statements like, “I’d like to try out that new game, but if I can’t have my name in it, then I’m not going to play.”

Clearly, conflicting desires here lead to both the need for unique names and also the imperative of letting players choose the pseudonym that suits them.  The only major mud to ever launch without unique names was Ultima Online. As a result, it also lacked effective in-game communication tools, and problems with impersonation of other players ran rampant. At the same time, large-scale muds (and in fact, any large scale system with unique names, such as America Online) run out of plausible names extremely quickly—this was the reason why UO made the choice it did. Inability to obtain a particular handle upon first login is often cited by players as a reason for not staying on a mud. There are well under 5,000 names in common usage in the English language, and even the addition of fantasy names does not account for enough handles to cover a player base of over 100,000. EverQuest handled this by creating a random name generator that simply used syllable combination to generate gibberish; the results were far from satisfying and failed to meet the best test of a name: strong mnemonic identification. Another frequently suggested solution to the problem is to allow duplicate names but expose some sort of unique identifying number or code for every player to the populace at large. This also fails the mnemonic test, of course, but doesn’t preclude multiple “John Smiths.” A better solution would involve breaking down a name into components, such as first name, surname, place of origin, and other such identifying characteristics. Thus there could be countless Johns, and even many John Smiths, but only one John Smith of Avalon.