Can you imagine what would it be like to have no
name?
It would be a complete chaos and would change the way of communicating as
we know it today. While in real life we are limited to the name given at
birth, in Second Life we have the freedom to choose a name as an indicator of
anonymity and yet, as our personal and in-transmissible identification card to the virtual world.
The fact that we can choose our name makes it very special, whether because
it has a symbolic character, because it’s funny, meaningful or simply because
we identify with it. But our task of choosing may not be that simple in our first steps before entering the doors of Second
Life, especially if we want that very specific name and we face with the
message “name already in use” during the registration process. Second Life’s
new feature to have a display name offers us a second chance to choose it right.
While most times others can read our names beyond the written
characters; our gender, your nationality, a first impression of our role in SL,
sometimes we find people with names we cannot even pronounce if we try. Who
never had to copy the name of a friend or a stranger in his/her profile before
starting a conversation?
The SLE wandered the streets of Second Life searching for unusual names
and asking people: What does your name
mean? We would like to thank all the participants.
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