What’s in a name? The names of DestinyQuest Infinite and its heroes

If you’re reading this, you probably know that DestinyQuest Infinite is the name of our first game (if you didn’t know that, hello and welcome! Try a demo, buy a game, enjoy yourselves). DestinyQuest is a fitting name for a tale that revolves around your quest to uncover your past and reveal what you’re destined for. I think it’s a fitting name, and catchy.

Not as great as Adventure Cow. Seriously, isn’t that just the best name? 

Google disagrees. We want to make sure people can find our game if they search for it, and in making that happen we’ve discovered some interesting (read: annoying) things about the most commonly used search engine.

Google has great predictive powers. It knows to substitute common synonyms when you do a general search. And it knows when you make a typo – like forget to put a space. So of course it automatically changes DestinyQuest to Destiny Quest because you can’t possibly have meant to type that run on phrase.

Even if you search YouTube for our trailer, the otherwise awesome algorithm adds a space then says almost apologetically “Oh, did you really mean to type ‘DestinyQuest’? I guess I can look for that too, if you insist.”

Actually enough humans have made the same mistake when talking about DestinyQuest Infinite, and added a space. Adventure Cow, the company behind the game, does have a space on the other hand. When I was first starting out here, by the fifth time I asked which has a space and which doesn’t all I got out of Chris was “ARGH.”

All this is only complicated by the fact that searching for “DestinyQuest Infinite game” gets you mostly results for the game Destiny, or the game Bioshock: Infinite. DestinyQuest app? That already exists in the form of an educational search engine for school kids. Maybe we should have gone the same route as rymdkapsel and chosen something that no one else would use, ever.

So the game name – kind of important.

But what about your hero’s name?

I’ve come to realize that many people create a persona around their character, using the same name in a number of places. I’m guilty of this too: my screenname everywhere is Aeval, after a celtic faerie with a surprisingly feminist outlook on things. In games and gamebooks though, I opt for Sora Leiland, the slightly mentally unbalanced thief with trust issues that I cooked up when I was 10.

Yes, pretty much Parker from Leverage, but significantly less awesome

The name of your character can affect the way you play. I generally go down the kindest, least confrontational routes in games (I’m over 30 hours into Deus Ex because I refuse to kill anyone. Not even the dogs). But if I name my hero Sora, I’m suddenly more likely to maybe pocket a few coins from a guy trapped in the grips of a killer vine instead of helping him. Because that’s what Sora would do, of course.

I imagine I’m not the only person who does this. What’s your hero’s name? Does the name affect the way you play the game? We’d love to know!

Yuliya

Yuliya handles marketing and writing at QuestForge, and is the self-appointed chief of keeping Chris sane (despite Chris's insistence that he is the sane one).