In writing my IF reviews and books, I often refer to people on this forum in the third person. Preferred pronouns are of course very helpful for that, I’ve often looked at people’s pages here and on twitter to know whether to write ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘them’, or ‘e’, etc.
But what do people think about names? For instance, with Andrew Plotkin you could say his full name Andrew Plotkin, or just Andrew, or Plotkin, or Zarf, for a sentence like ‘Plotkin was the first person to win both the XYZZY Best Game Award and the IFComp.’
I come from an academic background, so I usually just use the last name. However, I remember Andrew Schultz mentioned not liking being called ‘Schultz’. Some people I strongly associate with their usernames, like agat (and Zarf), so I tend to use those usernames.
For myself, I like ‘mathbrush’ over Brian Rushton except in formal settings, because there are a lot of Brian Rushtons but mathbrush is fairly rare (outside of a math-related computer program), so it’s easier to keep track of. But I don’t mind Brian Rushton when the writer feels like it’s better for their current purposes.
How do you prefer to be referred to? I’m interested both in general (to see what’s a good habit to adopt going forward) and for specific people, so in the future I can refer to this thread and think, ‘Oh yea, N. Cormier likes the initial + last name’ or whatever.
Well, N. Cormier is a pseudonym (I still haven’t decided what the N stands for!) so either the whole thing or Encorm is fine. I think splitting it up would be weird in a way that it wouldn’t for someone’s actual name.
On a side note, one of the nice things about the community being small is there’s relatively few name collisions! If someone’s talking about “Brian” it’s probably you, and when someone is talking about an Andrew or Dan there’s only a few candidates.
I feel like ‘de Augustine’ opens up the potential for some weirdness with regards to capitalization, since the ‘de’ portion should be in lowercase: but Sophia is a bit too vague in of itself, I’d imagine? And Sophia de Augustine is a bit long to repeatedly refer to. I think probably the best practice to follow would be to use the full name once, (Sophia de Augustine), and then Sophia henceforth.
That is generally true! There are one or two amusing anomalies: Mike S., and Matt W.
For Mike S. we have Mike Sousa, who’s done some great collab games; Mike Snyder, who was nominated for a lot of XYZZY best games and started this forum; and Mike Spivey, who wrote the math games.
For Matt W., IFDB has four Matt W.'s, two of which are Matt Wigdahl (author of Aotearoa, XYZZY and IFComp winner) and Matt Weiner (mod of this forum and author of several games).
More seriously, either Mike or Russo is fine (Mike is such a common name even my sister called me “Russo” in elementary school).
My brain has decided it stands for “Nicole” fwiw, even though I know it’s just an initial; I knew a Nicole with a French last name a million years ago and apparently that association is firmly lodged in my head!
I go by Zarf informally, but in an academic discussion I would use my legal name. (All my games are bylined “by Andrew Plotkin”, so that fits.) Reviews on the forum could go either way, though.
I realize that’s not much guidance. I usually say “up to you!” but I realize that’s not a useful answer. :)
Since I do most of my writing in an academic context now, I would also use just the last name after the first mention. I know a few other Stelzers in real life (most not related to me at all!) but none in the IF community.
For me it’s largely context dependant. If discussing one of my games in a review or something similar, the name it was published under is usually preferred. Just “Arlo” or even “arlo” is fine in most informal contexts.
In a scholarly context, I have no problem with the “full name on first mention and surname thereafter” convention, and it wouldn’t faze me to see in a review either (I am a sometime freelance book reviewer and it’s what I’d do in that context, though the tone of IF reviews tends to be a little less formal than that).
Informally I tend to go by “EJ”, but I’m not particularly picky. The only thing I don’t like is when people seem to assume “Joyce” is my given name and use it that way when talking to me (“Hi Joyce”, “Thanks Joyce”, whatever).
“Zed Lopez” for first mention. If the milieu is formal and one is following a style guide calling for “Lopez” for subsequent references, that’s fine. Otherwise, I prefer “Zed”, but it’s not a big deal.
well, I never ask someone to use my full formal name:
Nobilis Homo dottor Piergiorgio Maria Fede Pasquale d’ Errico, figlio di Rosanna Falanga figlia di giorgina Funaro figlia di Clotilde Di Segni
(for the context: my paternal grandfather was of lesser gowned nobility of the Two Sicilies, and my maternal grandmother is hebrew, so both lineages, gentile and salian and judaic and matrilinear, are merged in that monster… and yes, I 'fess up, Etuye and Miyai’s background are modeled after this uncommon situation…)
People have exactly one full name which they go by.
People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
People’s names do not change.
People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
People’s names are written in ASCII.
People’s names are written in any single character set.
People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
People’s names are case sensitive.
People’s names are case insensitive.
People’s names sometimes have prefixes or suffixes, but you can safely ignore those.
People’s names do not contain numbers.
People’s names are not written in ALL CAPS.
People’s names are not written in all lower case letters.
People’s names have an order to them. Picking any ordering scheme will automatically result in consistent ordering among all systems, as long as both use the same ordering scheme for the same name.
People’s first names and last names are, by necessity, different.
People have last names, family names, or anything else which is shared by folks recognized as their relatives.
People’s names are globally unique.
People’s names are almost globally unique.
Alright alright but surely people’s names are diverse enough such that no million people share the same name.
My system will never have to deal with names from China.
Or Japan.
Or Korea.
Or Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Russia, Sweden, Botswana, South Africa, Trinidad, Haiti, France, or the Klingon Empire, all of which have “weird” naming schemes in common use.
That Klingon Empire thing was a joke, right?
Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names.
There exists an algorithm which transforms names and can be reversed losslessly. (Yes, yes, you can do it if your algorithm returns the input. You get a gold star.)
I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it.
People’s names are assigned at birth.
OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
Five years?
You’re kidding me, right?
Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person.
Two different data entry operators, given a person’s name, will by necessity enter bitwise equivalent strings on any single system, if the system is well-designed.
People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎.
mathbrush is fairly rare (outside of a math-related computer program)
Fun fact: My supervisor is the originator of the MathBrush software, and I spent a bunch of time doing research for its handwritten math expression recognizer (that ultimately went nowhere), so every time I see your username I do a double-take.
Aw man, I always assumed that the world of people who know about or use the Mathbrush software and the world of people I interact with would have no intersection. I apologize if I made it harder for people searching for it, but I doubt it given that the software appears higher on google searches.
