Deciding on a gamertag isn’t easy. You don’t want your tag to be lame, and many of your first ideas may already be in use or not permitted by Microsoft. So you get creative-you spell words with special characters or add letters or numbers to the beginning or end of the desired tag. In my case, I reflected on past heated deathmatch sessions with my college roommate, and chose to make my gamertag a derivative of a creative expletive I used on my roommate-who was kicking my ass in Half Life at the time. In the heat of battle, I combined a four letter word followed by the word monkey. I knew this four letter word attached to monkey wouldn’t fly on Xbox Live, so I created a spoonerism of that by swapping the first letter of the four letter word with the first letter of monkey to arrive at my tag. I also made some other spelling modifications so the end result was phonetically in line with the original, non-politically correct creation. I was striving for a tag that would please me, the all-ages gaming public, and Microsoft. The tag I created was not a word you can find in the dictionary, nor were any parts of the final creation. Most adults could probably figure out what the tag was, but it is highly unlikely a child I might be playing UNO with online would figure it out (yes, I play UNO-there I said it.) I even had an occasion to call Xbox Live support (for a RARE red-ring-of-death incident) and the guy I spoke with of course asked for my gamertag--which I spelled out, and without saying what he thought the original words may have been out loud (because he could get fired for using the four letter word in question on the phone with a customer) he just said, I like spoonerisms. That was the polite way of saying he knew what my gamertag was an homage to. It also bears mentioning that I never verbally informed people of the fact it was indeed a spoonerism--and many didn’t tumble on its root word origins. Quite a few fellow gamers even mispronounced the tag. I don’t want to reveal the original tag, since it was banned recently by Microsoft, because I was able to make very slight modifications that made the gamertag rename wizard happy, while preserving the original tag within the changes.

The bottom line is that my gamertag, a made up word, was banned by Microsoft even though it did NOT contain any words that could be found in any dictionary. It appears that Microsoft is now banning made up words that have no definition or meaning in any language because someone could construct words they find offensive by rearranging or swapping the letters of my gamertag. All in the name of protecting the young gamers on LIVE? I think it goes without saying that verbal exchanges in LIVE games are usually much more graphic and offensive than any gamertag could ever dream to be. Ironically, my tag got banned on the very same weekend GayGamer got banned. Microsoft claimed the GayGamer tag was banned because of its sexual nature - never mind that the word Gay can also be defined as happily excited or bright and lively and by those definitions, all Xbox Live gamers could be described as GAY--except of course when they are suffering from the infamous red ring of death.