Choosing a username can be a paralyzing moment for many gamers, and unless you are one those degenerates who pick a name like “ßàtmäñ,” then you probably put a lot of thought into your gamer handle. After all, it is really the only unique characteristic you have in most games, and it is often the nickname other players use to refer to you.

According to a new study published in the journal “Computers in Human Behavior,” your gamer handle can represent much more than a handy nickname—it can actually say a lot about your personality and even your age.

The study was conducted by University of York Professor Alex Wade and PhD student Athanasios Kokkinakis, along with support from Jeff Lin and Davin Pavlas, both of whom work for League of Legends developer Riot Games. By reviewing a random sample of 450,000 datasets, the researchers were able to correlate many players’ ages and likeliness to participate in anti-social game behaviors with the names they chose for their handles.

“Video games can provide a wealth of useful population-level information on developmental, cognitive and psychological processes,” Professor Wade said (via Game Politics). “We found that people who have anti-social names tend to behave in an anti-social way within the game. Younger people behave poorly and older people less so. This data is like a window on individual players’ personalities so we believe that we might be able to use video games a way of testing people’s personalities.”

Figuring out a player’s age can be relatively easy: A lot of people put the year of their birth at the end of their username as a way of getting the name they want even if it is already taken. Determining how a player might behave is a little more complicated, and it involves correlating the words contained in usernames to a list of “highly anti-social words” and then comparing that information to data gained from Riot’s in-game reporting tools, which allow users to report players for harassment and other negative behaviors.

So, for example, if you have a username like “BabyPuncher1992,” there is a good chance that you are a 23-year-old jerk who frequently gets reported by other players.

“Our findings suggest that players’ real-world characteristics influence behaviour and interpersonal interactions within online games,” the researchers said in their study. “Anonymized statistics derived from such games may therefore be a valuable tool for studying psychological traits across global populations.”

You can read or download the full report here.

Photo (top) by Eric David | SiliconANGLE
Image credit: Riot Games (c)