Ps4 Name Generator

Your handle gets said out loud

Most usernames live on a screen. You type them, you read them, nobody ever pronounces them.

A gaming handle is different, and people forget this until it is too late. Yours gets said in party chat. It gets said by a friend recommending you to somebody else. It gets said by a stranger who is annoyed with you. If you ever end up on a stream or in a bracket, somebody who has never met you reads it off a screen and says it to an audience.

So your name has to work in the ear, not just the eye. And it turns out that a name which is easy to say does something for you that has nothing to do with taste.

People like names they can pronounce

In 2012 three psychologists, Simon Laham, Peter Koval and Adam Alter, ran five studies on a question nobody had properly asked. Does it matter, socially, whether your name is easy to say?

It matters a great deal. They called it the name-pronunciation effect. People with easy-to-pronounce names, and the names themselves, were judged more positively than people with difficult ones. It held when they buried the names inside detailed newspaper articles full of real information about the person. It held for people from the reader's own group.

Then they went and looked at the real world. Among lawyers, the people with easier-to-pronounce surnames were sitting higher up their firms.

The part that makes this useful rather than merely depressing is what they ruled out. The effect was not about length. It was not about the name being unusual, or foreign, or oddly spelled. It was about the pure mechanical ease of getting the sounds out of your mouth.

Your brain reads that ease as a small pleasant feeling, and then hands the feeling to whatever it happened to be looking at. Which, in a lobby, is you.

Hard to say, easy to distrust

This is not one lonely finding. It sits inside a much larger pile of work on what psychologists call processing fluency, and the pile is consistent to the point of being funny.

Things with hard-to-pronounce names get judged as riskier. Claims written in a font that is harder to read get believed less. And in one study that ought to worry anybody who owns shares, companies whose stock tickers were easy to pronounce outperformed the awkward ones in early trading.

None of these people were consciously judging the name. They just found the thinking slightly harder, felt slightly worse, and blamed whatever was in front of them.

Now apply that to a name somebody has to say into a microphone during a firefight.

An easy name buys you goodwill you did not earn. It is free, it works on everybody, and most people give it away in exchange for looking clever.

The test that takes eight seconds

Say the name to somebody who cannot see it written down. Ask them to type it.

That is the whole test, and almost nothing passes it that has any of the following.

A number standing in for a letter. You know it is an e. They hear an e. They type an e.

Characters that share a shape. A lowercase l, a capital I and the digit one are indistinguishable in most fonts. So are a capital O and a zero. Somebody will always guess wrong.

A doubled letter. Two or three? Nobody can hear the difference, including you.

A silent letter you added for atmosphere. If it does not survive being spoken, it does not exist.

A word from a language your friends do not read. Beautiful on screen. A hostage situation in voice chat.

What passes: two ordinary words joined together. Names built from things rather than moods. Anything a stranger can spell after hearing it once.

Every handle gets shortened

Nobody uses your full name in a fight. Whatever you choose, people will cut it down to the first syllable or two, and they will do it within a week.

So you may as well choose the short form yourself.

Look at your name and ask what survives when everything after the fifth letter falls off. Is it a word? Is it a sound anybody would want to shout? Is it accidentally somebody else's name?

Names that shorten well have a strong first syllable and something worth keeping in it. Names that shorten badly have all their personality in the second half, where nobody will ever go.

Say it aloud. Then say it aloud in a hurry, at volume, the way somebody would if they wanted your attention immediately. That is the real name. Everything else is spelling.

Where the list comes from

The names come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, and one is drawn at random when you press the button. It runs on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about PlayStation names

What are the rules for a PlayStation online ID?

Three to sixteen characters, made of letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores, and it has to begin with a letter. There is more on the history of those rules on the PSN name generator.

Does it really matter if my name is easy to say?

More than you would think. Across five studies, easy-to-pronounce names and the people carrying them were consistently judged more favourably, and the effect survived when the researchers controlled for length, strangeness and foreignness. It is a small free advantage, and it costs nothing to take.

Are numbers in a handle bad?

Only when they replace letters. A number that stands for something is fine. A number pretending to be an e or an o guarantees that half the people trying to add you will spell it the human way.

How long should a handle be?

Short enough to say in one breath. The research found that length itself was not the thing that mattered, but a long name gives a stranger more chances to stumble, and a stumble is what you are trying to avoid.

Should I use capital letters in the middle?

They look good and they cost you accuracy, because nobody remembers where they were. If you use them, make them fall in the obvious place, at the start of each word.

References

1. Laham, S. M., Koval, P. and Alter, A. L. (2012). The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(3), 752 to 756. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.002
2. Laham, Koval and Alter (2012), full text. https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~aalter/namefluency.pdf
3. How to change your online ID. PlayStation Support. https://coid.support.playstation.com/s/faqs