“If you’re going into a new environment — whether that’s a video game, or a social-media platform, or a subreddit — look into the social norms of that community first,” says Nikki Crenshaw, a researcher at Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of World of Warcraft and other online games. Crenshaw got her doctorate in informatics last year from the University of California, Irvine, where she studied naming practices in online video games.

Read the full story at The New York Times Magazine.