Picking the perfect gaming alias is no easy task. I chose mine when I was 14, and while it’s too embarrassing to reveal, I’m not sure I’d come up with anything better today. But there are hosts of name generators now available online to assist you in your selection.

I was curious to see what aliases people choose, so I selected four popular PC games, and pulled at least 1500 names of the top-rated players for each game. I then ran a character and length analysis on the names. Players can, in some cases, use symbols, numerals, and non-English letters in their names. These were included in the length analysis, but I separated them from the names for frequency analysis. For those wondering why I didn’t include WoW, there were just too many non-English letters in the names for the results to be meaningful.

The usage analysis shows the frequency with which English-letters are used; these values were normalized to how often the letters are used in the English language. This highlights the overuse of letters that are usually rare (e.g., Z, X), and the underuse of common letters (e.g., T, E). I have noted the percentage of characters that are not in the English alphabet (e.g., conventions, numerals, non-English letters).

For the length analysis, I counted all characters (not including spaces). As shown in the graph, EVE Online names tend to be longer and SC2 names tend to be shorter; RIFT and SWTOR have similar distributions.

On a side note, if anyone wants to feel really good about their SC2 skills, come find me. I’ll be the really mediocre Protoss player building only void rays.

Data sources:

http://www.cryptograms.org/letter-frequencies.php (English letter frequencies for normalization)

http://eveboard.com/ranks

http://www.rifthead.com/leaderboard-players

http://www.sc2ranks.com/pro/players/

http://www.swtor.com/leaderboards/pvp/solo