For Dragon Age Origins, I assigned a Mane 6 pony to each origin. Human noble Rarity, Mage Twilight, city-Elf Fluttershy, forest-Elf Rainbow Dash, Dwarf noble Applejack, and brand-Dwarf Pinkie Pie.

Trying to role-play based on the names is going to be a lot of fun.

For my first character, it's always based on me. From the name to the appearance to the character traits, I do it to best immerse myself in the game.

So it's usually either "Jakob Fel" (for sci-fi stuff) or "Jaekob Caed" (for fantasy).

Always default now. Used to use my own name and friends names when I was a kid.

Just don't install any lewd mods along with that unless you want your gameplay to be rather awkward

Alistair already fell in love with Fluttershy; that was without mods, but still.

I just use my Alias, or some variation if there are a few. For games with a few more characters, like Worms, one will take my alias and will make up names for the rest. For MMOs, I create a name that reflects the character I want to create, which is kind of hard since all names generally need to be unique. Hardest thing in World of Warcraft is thinking of a good name that hasn't already been taken, even if you make up a Latin word chances are it's already in use.

I heard that George Lucas used to name dog Chewbacca,but enough of movie I guess I should stop because this thread isn’t about movies. But rather video games,but before for instance Epic Games started doing Unreal Tournament Cliff Bleszinski named his own dog Jazz before even Jazz Jackrabbit was even made.