There's an interesting story over on Gamasutra right now, written by Elyot Grant, the developer of an indie game called Prismata.
At a time when more and more people are trying their hand at making commercially available games themselves, the article addresses the problem of what to actually call your creation. Grant offers some useful pointers while also revealing the somewhat twisted path he and his colleagues at Lunarch Studios followed, in order to get to "Prismata," which is a cross between a a card game and a real-time strategy.
"Naming Prismata was probably the hardest decision we ever had to make," he writes. "I imagine that it might feel similar to naming a first child, except there are lawyers involved."
He says the team spent four years trying to figure out a name, navigating a maze of problems such as avoiding names that are already taken, finding something redolent of the subject, considering practicalities like search engines and urls and, of course, plumping for something they could all live with.
This is a process that all game-makers, or indeed entertainment creators of any stripe, need to go through. There are agencies that come up with names for commercial products, and they are widely used by the makers of automobiles or internet services. But they are expensive services and more suited to large marketing departments than small, emotionally invested teams.
Glancing down Polygon's front page today, it's interesting to look at the random game names and try to make some judgment of them, as if heard for the first time. It is always, of course, difficult to reflect on familiar words and names, once they have become unfamiliar, but it's fun to try.
- Battlefield is extremely descriptive, but also a bit bland.
- Call of Duty, on the other hand, offers a sense of what it is along with a dash of style.
- The Vanishing of Ethan Carter speaks vividly of a mystery, with Agatha Christie-esque undertones of narrative and violence.
- Uncharted sounds like a smart marketing solution to the problem of "how to suggest adventure and exploration," though it could also be a game about cartography.
- Destiny suggests heroism, exploration and conquest, even if it's generic. Games with big marketing budgets, like any other product, are quickly imbued with meaning. A game this big could not afford to come out with a low-level Steamish moniker like "Solar Alien Rebellion" or whatever.
- Grand Theft Auto is about as cool a name as you could ask, if you are talking about a game involving crime and cars. It's interesting that the name comes from Britain, where no crime of that name exists. It glamorizes something sordid; the entire point of this series.
- Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor features three key words; two of which place the game in a beloved world while the other is one of those video-gamey words, "shadow," used to denote darkness and peril. Mordor itself is a reflection of Tolkien's genius for the music of language, a place that sounds like murder and a major city, at the same time.
- Likewise, the "Dark" in Dark Souls is a generic word, but when twinned with "Souls" it tells us of an evil realm, though the name is not especially descriptive. It could be a horror movie or even a whimsical arthouse rom-com.
Back to Prismata. Without knowing much of the game it seems to speak of light and machines, possibly some sort of peril or disease. The game was originally codenamed "Magic, Chess, Dominion and Starcraft" (MCDS) which was how the team referred to the project.
They looked at calling it "Breach," for a while, but like many combat-style single name noun / verbs, it had already been taken. As Grant points out, these words come with all sorts of copyright baggage and are terrible for search engines. Phrases came and went, though they can often sound generic. You can play your own game of inventing crappy generic game names; "Portal of Doom," or "Battle for Liberty," for example. They favored "Cosmic Harvest" for a while. I'm glad they didn't pick it.
This is not to say that bland phrases cannot be plumped up into something meaningful; League of Legends, for example.
They also looked at portmanteaus (words jammed together to make new words) which are highly favored by game makers. Skyrim or Minecraft for example. This yielded a large pot of potentials which the developers could play around with.
After much agonizing, Prismata became the choice. "The name Prismata rolls off the tongue quite nicely, and has a crisp, angular sound association that goes well with concepts of aggression and outer space," writes Grant. " As for its semantic value, the 'prism-' morpheme has a lot of conscious and subconscious associations. It looks like 'prize,' sounds a bit like 'orgasm,' makes you think of interesting objects, and connotes concrete function mixed with elegance. Prismata is easy to say and relatively easy to spell, which were also important qualities."
As you can see, Grant and his team spent a lot of time thinking about names, researching them and whittling down a long-list. For anyone else going through this process, he offers a useful roster of tips, including some warnings about registering urls that are a must-read. As in most creative endeavors, hard work, luck and iteration were all factors in naming the game.
"The way that we thought up the name Prismata was a bit serendipitous," adds Grant. "We combined unrelated existing names and ideas. 'Prismatic Reactor' was an early unit in 2010-era Prismata, which converted resources into other types. The unit description was something like "Pay one green resource and get one of each of the other two resources". We've long scrapped the unit (some variation of it will probably appear in an expansion a bit later), but the notion of something being 'prismatic' struck a chord with me in our efforts to name the game."