What’s in a Name?
Naming a character in a game can range from being an afterthought that serves as nothing more then lip service, to being the first step in creating a touchstone to identify with and grow fondness for in what the player is about to spend countless hours interacting with. As games have grown deeper and more complex, with developers beginning to pour more time and effort not only into the gameplay and mechanics but also the story and level of interactivity, the use of custom player created characters has become more of a selling point as the years have gone on. While the pitfalls and problems of more open ended, open world games with choice is an issue many still grapple with, players personalizing their characters all tend to begin with a few basic elements, most notably a name. While I can only speak for myself, many players do have a habit of re-using the same names, or in fact, same characters repeatedly, across multiple games. It doesn’t matter how varied the genres are, or how shallow or deep the customization options, or even how much change they can affect within the game world itself, I tend to find myself leaning on a handful of characters when staring at a Create-A-Character screen. Maybe that silly name they made up just got stuck in their heads as they spent 100 hours in that RPG, or the events of that visual novel struck a chord and now there’s a sort of bond with the character that can never be separated. Perhaps the character precedes gaming or is from another source, like a Tabletop, Pen & Paper, or other form of RPG.
Regardless, as I went through the character creation in Divinity: Original Sin recently and went to just instinctively type in the two names I always use, I paused and had to think about it. It’s a little weird that, despite all these games over the years having nothing to do with each other outside of superficial things like genre or playstyle, it’s not even a question what I would not only name these characters, but how I would play them. It’s not even a matter of these two would just automatically do exactly what I would want to do, but their personalities were formed from all the past games and stories I’ve used them in. While they’re not too disparate from my own self, neither of them are just me either. I’ve played many games, like the Pokemon series, as “just me” and used either my handle or real name, and I can certainly see myself in both Hart Reign and Kalen Gentz, but they’re weirdly almost other people I’ve known for almost two decades at this point. It’s like a famous author creating characters in a novel that becomes wildly popular, except in this case it’s not popular at all and it really is only an important moment for me and me alone. I mostly just want to think back on exactly where these two (actually, three…) characters got started and how they evolved as I took them through their journeys through games and other forms of fiction, and take note where I just made up something off the cuff that the game would never actually reflect, or took an event that did happen and let if have a long lasting impact on the way I would play and use the character in subsequent years. Maybe others out there will want to stop and reflect on their own characters and names in a similar fashion and see things they didn’t realize before.
Hart and another character, Pearl, were created as a duo back in my pre-teen days as -sigh- Team Rocket OC’s. Yeah, I was one of those. Naturally, any Pokemon fans’ go to M.O. for making new members of the sinister organization’s squad was to take other famous Wild West outlaws names and split them up into a male and female duo. Rather then do the easy thing and make Billie & Kidd (though I did end up using that with a twist), I just had to be the over achiever and looked up a bunch of other famous outlaws from the American Wild West and made a handful of them from my little mind’s machinations. From Samantha & Bastion (Sam Bass), Allison & Clay (Clay Allison), the trio of Billie, Sundance & Kidd (Billy the Kid and The Sundance Kid, of course), Joanne & Collin (Joe Collins), and of course, Pearl & Hart, from Pearl Hart, the female outlaw who was one of the last reported Stagecoach robbers. Maybe it was because she was the one who was the most interesting to me, but while I have almost completely forgotten about those other Team Rocket gang members, Pearl and Hart both just stuck with me. They stuck with me enough that, fast forward to Senior year in High School, when having to write a short story for English Honor Society, I plucked those two out of the recesses of my mind and made them the protagonists for my Archaeological dig mystery short. They were, honestly, just thinly veiled rip-offs of Squall and Selphie from Final Fantasy VIII laced with the little bit of characterization I have them in those old stories. What is notable here is that this was where I gave them their surnames – Hart Reign, from Squall’s mother Raine Loire, and Pearl Tilly, taken from Selphie’s own last name, Tillmet. While I dropped the stolen personalities, I kept the names, and they continue to have them to this day.
The first time I finally took Hart into gaming was in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. As the Nerevarine, I did try to play him as a basic, boring Lawful Good character, but as I did so, I just got less and less interested in the game. This was probably one of the moments where my young self began to realize the black and white outlook on life and morality wasn’t really all that fair or even believable, and so I let Hart start to branch out a little. When the Godfather video game came to the Wii via The Blackhand Edition, Hartford Reign did in fact reign terror upon New York in his quest to succeed Don Corleone and did so by any means necessary. However, it was in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on the PC where I began to feel excessively uncomfortable with being self-serving and found my limits in how far I or Hart could go down the dark side, as it were. It wasn’t even a particularly huge sidequest, it was literally just bilking a poor woman out of her money and leaving her with nothing and intimidating her to do nothing about it besides curse your name. There was no reason to be such a vile piece of crap to the lady other than just because you could, and this was where I figured out what Hart was. A good person who fits the mold as the hero and wants to do what he can as any goody two shoes would but wasn’t an idiot about it like many are. While he has his limits, he won’t be blindly heroic either and understands how the world works, like it or not, but won’t sit by idly either. An ideal good guy in every sense of the word without the baggage of it being misused by scumbags or the trappings of parody or satire. Earnest and genuine, but with a sense of humor and affable. It’s strange that such a meaningless sidequest in a game filled with no real people is what tipped the scale for me, but it is what it is. It’s hard to explain, but it’s what made me change my mind about trying to do everything in any given game, and instead only stick to what I think my character would do, no matter how silly it might seem in the face of the logic of getting as much EXP or Gold or whatever as possible.
So, when Hart Reign, the future Hero of Kvatch, stepped foot out of the prison in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, he most assuredly did not join the Dark Brotherhood and made a point of killing the messenger who awakened him that night with that questline, if only to ensure he would never be tempted to join up. Also, I personally always thought the Assassin’s Guild in Morrowind was more interesting then these Hot Topic Goth rejects, so there’s that. Even so, when Hart, the Lone Wanderer set forth on his journey to try and do every little bit of good he could in the Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3, he also did not hesitate to murder every single last slaver he could find in Paradise Falls and beyond. While I would use Hart now and then in other games, he would later get eclipsed in use by Kalen instead as I began to play women more often. However, Hart has since found a niche that he has excelled at, in a way that reunites him with his fellow creation, Pearl. Hart & Pearl have been my main characters across the various WWF/E wrestling games, starting from WWE Smackdown: Here Comes the Pain, all the way into WWE2K14, and after skipping a handful of the series lately, are back in full force in the current as of this writing WWE 2K18. It was not a fit I was expecting, but after years of using the duo to go through the various Season Modes, Universe Modes, and Story modes, the two have racked up an impressive and bonkers storyline as WWE Superstars, a tale that’s best left for another time. While I’ve made several other long running created characters in the series with their own twists and turns, Hart and Pearl have had their ups and downs as allies and even enemies, and some of the unintended consequences from those plotlines have wormed their way into how I portray both. Pearl was just a generic tough lady, but I’ve since fleshed her out into being a sweet, friendly girl who’s open and honest…but also willing to get violent and break your damn neck if she has to, because of the nature of how, shall we say, poorly women were (Ha! “were”) written in the WWE at the time. The “Divas” as they were known at the time, had basically been reduced to precisely three types of characters – you were either a bitch, crazy, or a crazy bitch. Like, no joking, good or bad, all of them were basically portraying terrible human beings, more so then the men. It’s since gotten marginally better, but I just wanted to make women wrestlers who actually got to be characters in every sense of the word like the guys, and it started with Pearl for me.
Quite a bit of both Hart and Pearl’s smaller character growth came from these games, oddly – with the former reinforcing his status as a hero who’ll do what needs to be done without crossing the line, and the latter being willing to toe or touch the line without completely falling over it. Even something as simple as giving them matching tattoos on opposite arms has in turn been brought out into other games – even when it’s just Hart, there’s the mark on his right arm, matching the one on Pearl’s left, played by Lady-Not-Appearing-in-this-Game. I settled on their relationship being not a couple, but being deeper and closer then merely being friends, because after all, it takes an exceptional amount of work to regain trust after attempting to murder one another in a parking lot or throwing the other off the edge of a two-story cage. The two are just inseparable to me in my mind, and will always have each other’s backs till the end. So, you know how I mentioned Divinity: Original Sin up there? After going over all of this in my mind, I had a change of heart (pun not intended) – this was going to be the game starring not Hart & Kalen, my two typical main characters teaming up, but Hart & Pearl, reuniting once more outside the ring and in the realms of fantasy instead. While it’s an extremely different game type, the bickering and interactions the two have due to the game’s mechanics combined with the personalities I’ve built up in my mind are pitch perfect.
That’s the story of Hart & Pearl, though I’m sure they will continue to have adventures for as long as I play games. Still, that’s only half of my story – while Pearl has found her place back in my character rotation, most of my female characters have another name and history that in some ways are a bit more important to my own growth and personality, but this article is long enough. I’ll save the story of Kalen Gentz for next time. Does anyone else have names or characters they just continue to use over and over again in video games? Does it mean anything special to you, or is it just another name?