How do you come up with titles?

They're not that bad. I'd put out a Deluge of Underworld Rhapsody EP.

Haha thanks! It works better for an EP than a story though. I don't even know how I came up with such titles, really. At the time I thought that the longer and more elaborate the words, the better the title is, which is why they sound somewhat strange, like they've been translated from Chinese.

"Of" can work well in a slightly but not obscurely metaphorical sense. My game is about robots invading the galaxy. While they are refered to as the Machines, the name that stuck was the Legions of Steel. For the title, I dropped "the" so it is simply Legions of Steel.

Double entendres can work too.

Reign of Fire (vs Rain of Fire).

There's an article called Bad Titles.

While it's for Interactive Fiction, it might contain some hints for every medium.

Interestingly (or not), I thought Journey from an Islet and Whom the Telling Changed are good titles. "Islet" is a lot more evocative to me than "island", since it's a rarer word, and the second title is vague, but more memorable than the fiftieth game named Exile or the seventy-fifth named Corruption.

Temple of the Orc Mage is something I would probably play, since something so unabashedly D&D campaign-titled has got to have hidden layers.

Yeah, I didn't find all those titles bad, but that's to be expected. Interesting read, though, the author does have a point or two.

Most of the time, titles are based off a musical reference; three Fearblogs of mine use phrases from the song Sound of Silence by Simon And Garfunkel, such as Still Remains Within and In Restless Dreams.

If not that, then I will use either a literary reference, such as Triumph & Disaster, or whatever floats into my head while writing, such as Angels From The Grave or Crosser of the Stars.

edited 24th Aug '11 11:06:53 AM by cutewithoutthe

I always like titles with a double meaning, the first one being obvious and the other that you'd have to think about.

Be ambiguous but indicative of what the story tells.

I also don't agree with most of that IF article. I think of one-word titles, the kind I always use, as the nadir of naming; longer names that at least attempt to evoke something are, IMO, generally a lot better. Yes, he makes some good points (don't say Part One, don't make fart jokes, don't sound like a D&D game), but mostly it just sounds like personal preference.

(For instance, from my perspective, a game like Violet has a terrible title: The word is only mildly evocative to begin with, and when you find out it's the narrator's name, that leaves me thinking that this game has absolutely nothing to say about itself.)

And the sheer length leaves me thinking that this guy is just out to criticize every game title in existence, which, given the nature of the IF community, is probably true.

I would personally go with referencing what happened that really started the story, so long as it's big, a single death, not very big, unless it has a much bigger direct impact than it seems...