I’ve become entranced by a freeware computer game called N, in which a player guides a miniature ninja through a series of increasingly difficult layers of a puzzle, encountering monsters that resemble olives with antennae and other horrors. The ninja is also a credible physics simulation, so the effects of gravity and of various sorts of explosions on his body are riveting.

It’s a difficult game, and the little ninja ends up dying numerous times as each level is mastered; To engage my mind as well as my index fingers, I’ve taken to giving each of my avatars a little backstory. On one level, my ninja was the most honored warrior in Japan, who came out of retirement to save the population from a terrible evil. When he was blown to bits, the warrior’s son stepped up to the plate to avenge his father’s death.

Nope.

By the time I finished the level, the ninja had assumed the identity of the warrior’s evil twin’s grandnephew’s gay ex-lover.

Who says video games don’t foster the imagination?

Update: Now that no less a personage than Madonna has changed her name, I feel vindicated in my impulse to change Goblin’s. How about Potato Jubilicious, Documentary Filmmaker?

Update Two: Everyone is getting in on the act. This just in . . . my car changed its name from Grey Car to Ellen Ettoinne, VIII.