Yo I Am Quiting

NOTE: In case it is not clear, this blog is based on the fact that this person's name uses the word "quiting" rather than "quitting."

Xbox Live Gold Membership costs “$49.99 for one year—less than five dollars a month!” as stated on xbox.com. For those that are not as familiar with the service, a person buys membership and creates a profile not unlike Facebook or MySpace.

The first step in profile creation is choosing a name, also called a Gamertag. This Gamertag is your online name, the name that will appear when you kill someone in Halo 3 or score on someone in Madden.

Choosing my online name was something very important to me. My current name “hobodog” is a character from a children’s book I read growing up. I’m not sure why I picked it. Perhaps I disliked the idea of having a Gamertag without excessive numbers or Xs (e.g. Judorhapsode134769347538362 or xxJudorhapsodexx), so I picked a unique name.

You’d be surprised how many people online pronounce it “Haw-boh-dog” not “hoh-boh-dog.” In their defense, there's not a space in my Gamertag. It simply reads "hobodog." But still, have we not heard of compound words?

My friend, whom I know in real life, chose his name carefully as well. He chose his Gamertag based on one of his favorite books Steppenwolf. (Yes, I met him in English Grad School).

So with that entire context, I cannot feel bewildered by this young man or young woman’s choice to create a Gamertag with so obvious a spelling error. Perhaps they are so young that spelling errors are to be forgiven. But this rationalization naturally leads to another question: If this child is so young that they cannot use a dictionary, how and why are they paying $50.00 a year for an online service? The response to this question could be the parents pay for the service in which their young child, too naïve to use correct spelling, can meet people who use vulgar and sexually explicit language over unrestricted voice chat.

Maybe this gamer simply wanted an ironic Gamertag. Maybe this player wanted to create a commentary that online quitters (players who leave matches during play because they are losing) are stupid. Thus, spelling “quitting” incorrectly was a self-referential mocking of such a population: quitters are stupid and cannot spell correctly. But I seriously, seriously doubt this.

In all probability, this person is simply too lazy to edit his own writing. And yes, I am classifying one’s Gamertag as “writing” because it is a written form of self-expression. This is not a small typo, hidden in a sea of other words. This is his own chosen identity. Where is the pride?

Poor fellow. Good thing my team beat YO I AM QUITING’s team. Otherwise, this post would look like sour grapes.