Chris Crawford on Game Design

Naming Names

Another interesting problem that arose during the development of Guns & Butter was the problem of creating names for the various provinces. Most game designers have approached this problem by compiling long lists of names for use in the game; I wanted something better. I found it in some algorithms developed as part of research in computer science. The easiest way to understand these algorithms is to recall the old Edgar Allen Poe story about breaking a code using frequency analysis. The code breaker knew that e is the most frequently used letter in the English language, followed by t, then s, and so forth down to x, the least frequently used letter. By comparing these known letter frequencies with the letter frequencies in his coded ...