Can you select multiple players in a command?

Question

When you use a command like this:

/effect Tisajokt 1 30 1

You can give the IGN Tisajokt speed. Is there any way to list off multiple people in a command like the above, without scoreboard objectives?

Answer 1

No there isn't. You can only filter the list of players by certain criteria when using the @a selector. The ways in which you can filter are by position (including radius), min/maxscoreboard objective scored, having a certain item, min/max experience level, game mode or team.

See the wiki for a full description of each filter.

If there are two specific, named players you want to target, just use two command blocks.

Answer 2

There is one other way of doing this besides using Scoreboard. In 1.9 there was a new data tag introduced called a tag. If you tag the players or entities you want to get this effect, use the ! Selector with this tag to select everything you do not want to get this speed effect. If you need to know how to do this, I believe Dragnoz made a video about it on YouTube.