This post was created as part of

my activities with Nexon PEAK.

You meet all sorts of people while living in Erinn. It's nice to spend time chatting about the game and everyday life, and sometimes those conversations lead to unexpected connections. As you may know, my main character's name is "조가연." It isn't my real name, but I chose it because my surname is Jo. Jo isn't a particularly common surname, and my ancestral clan is smaller still. Out of curiosity, I decided to look up the numbers and tried a few searches on the 가문스캐너 website.

As expected, Kim, Lee, and Park were the most common surnames. Jo didn't even make the top 15. Because my character is called 조가연, quite a few people in the game have asked whether Jo is my surname or whether that's my real name. One day, after I explained that the given name wasn't mine but the surname was, another player told me their surname was Jo too.

We'd met while running 어비스로 뚫린 구멍 together and gotten to know each other through our conversations. We went on raids, ran Abyss together, and chatted about the little things in our lives. And now it turned out we were both Jos? Naturally, I was curious. I told them which ancestral clan I belonged to and asked about theirs. They said it was the same one. I've hardly ever met anyone from the same clan who also uses the same Chinese character for our surname. It's that uncommon... When I didn't believe them, they insisted they really did use the same character and showed me a photo of their ID with the other details covered up.

All that, over a surname. Who would have thought? Still, that moment really stayed with me. I think it brought home the fact that the person I was spending time with and talking to in the game was an ordinary person, just like me. After that, I started feeling more at ease talking to people I met in the game. As I'd gotten older, I'd become more guarded in games than I used to be. I'd begun to wonder whether making friends through games was something you could only do as a student or in your 20s. That encounter completely changed my mind.

I've just opened my friends list, and there they are, busy playing. They're usually the one to say hello first, so today I think I'll be the one to send a message. With that, I hope everyone reading this has a happy day.



If you're curious about surname statistics, take a look at the website I used!