Another Month of Writing

The history book continues to go well. Here's what I got done in March:

• FASA
• Gamelords
• Hero Games
• Flying Buffalo
• Avalon Hill

I'm getting a bit of a backload of things to revise and retouch, but I'm hoping I'll be able to even that out, going forward. This coming weekend there's no gaming, and so I think I'm going to take the opportunity to write about the biggest company that I haven't written yet: TSR. On the good side there's a ton of information on them, and on the bad side, there's a ton of information on them. I've been reading 30 years of D&D, which is quite good, and I have a 32-page history of TSR book to read sometime before the weekend too.

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The weekend was actually relatively restful, and that's because I barely touched the RQ elf book. At the start of the weekend I was 6 deity writeups short of having a first draft done; now I'm 4 deity writeups short. What remains isn't too much work, and a full edit should be relatively easy too, so I'm feeling much more relaxed about that project.

Anonymity & The Lack Thereof

In the last couple of weeks I had the same odd experience, twice: I got mail from someone wanting to get their name taken off of something at RPGnet. I didn't ask either person "why", but I can guess the reason: they didn't want the RPGnet page coming up when potential bosses googled their name when considering them for a job. And RPGnet is a big, popular site, so it comes up early on Google results, so I can understand the concern.

For one person he wanted his name taken off of a review that he'd written for RPGnet. I didn't have a problem with that, particularly since he'd just asked for his last name to be removed and it didn't actually offer any additional context to the review. Now we all know that in this world of caching and historical backups, it's never going to actually be gone ... but it might pull it off of the search results.

The other person wanted his name taken off of a review where it was mentioned that he'd *contributed to the product*. That was a harder call because it involved the core honesty of our underlying data. He wanted to pretend that he'd never contributed to a product that he had. Ultimately I told him no, and I'm pretty sure he was furious at that.

But, if I'd told him yes, where would it stop? If I remove an author's name from a product because he doesn't want to be associated with RPGs any more, do I later remove an author's name from a product that he's embarrassed by, or do I remove an author's name from a product because the publisher is now embarrassed by him? Worse, in a world of user-submitted reviews and index entries, do I have to catch his name every time someone submitted it again, and then remove it before we publish? I wouldn't even know how to keep track of that!

Granted, the latter issue wasn't a problem here because the credit was "additional contributions by", or something like that, but I thought the questions of veracity and truthful were nonetheless important.

Which I suppose means that in this brave new digital world, if you put your name to something, you'd better be sure that you'll be willing to stand proudly next to it in the future.