some of you merry lot already had to schedule a game against me; someone more than once.
have you noticed something recurring?
my game names. tomato.
why do I keep using that name?
- - is it because of my italian origins, being tomatoes one of the first thing that comes into your mind when you think about Italy? (funny thing: tomatoes came here from the Americas. Romans did not know about pizza.)
- - is it because I love those... fruits? veggies? well they're widely acknowledged as veggies so fine for me. they're tomatoes to me.
- - is it because tomatoes are squishy, as most of my players?
- - or is it because your players will be squished like tomatoes?
As John Lydon would say, NO; plus I'm not british.
So what?
Back in 2011, I was studying Systemic Design together with a lot of people coming from all around the globe
(sorry flatearthers). Me and my friend from Japan, tasked on creating a placeholder name for a shared storage space in the network were thinking about a word that could be understood from everyone, wherever they came from. the word had to be short, had to be simple, had to be understood universally especially outside of its own meaning.
TO
MA
TO
it's short, with different yet simple sounds, and is also meaningful for a large percentage of our comrades. Chinese exchange students had no problems at all understanding the word, even those who didn't spoke english (yep, we had that, and that was an issue we had to deal with). Few languages don't have the T and M letter/sound; O and A are two vowel we can find almost everywhere - we didn't go on full research, but we are reasonably sure those letters and those sounds could be understood in 95% of languages.
now you know, you can all rest easier.