Forums > Suggestions > Pseudonyms as developers

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Patrick Bregger (298879) on 8/1/2014 2:49 PM · Permalink · Report

Our current policy is to only allow pseudonyms when we know the person's real name. Personally I don't like this policy. There are many pseudonyms which are obviously always used by the same person (e.g. in many old Japanese games). I'd say to allow those to be entered as developers. Then they can be interlinked, used for research and easily changed when the real name is discovered.

I don't propose to make every "John" an developer, just in reasonable cases. You know, case-to-case judgement and such. We already more or less do this with music artists, so it is not a big leap.

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Kabushi (260849) on 8/1/2014 2:59 PM · Permalink · Report

I agree completely.

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Игги Друге (46654) on 8/2/2014 1:29 AM · Permalink · Report

Exactly. The day we found out that BIG ISLAND is actually called Ôshima, we can't find him because he's an entity.

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Sciere (927263) on 8/13/2014 1:44 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

On the fence about that, it's fairly easy to site google mobygames for the pseudonym once the real name has been discovered and update accordingly. We'll run into notability problem we generally steer away from; where to draw the line a pseudonym is notable enough ... number of games / prestige of the projects? I also fear for the auto assignment bug of names for really obvious / short ones.

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Havoc Crow (29800) on 8/13/2014 6:10 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

[Q --start Sciere wrote--]On the fence about that, it's fairly easy to site google mobygames for the pseudonym once the real name has been discovered and update accordingly. We'll run into notability problem we generally steer away from; where to draw the line a pseudonym is notable enough ... number of games / prestige of the projects? I also fear for the auto assignment bug of names for really obvious / short ones. [/Q --end Sciere wrote--] Unless we're talking about nicknames such as e.g. "Him" which really aren't that Googlable.

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Sciere (927263) on 8/13/2014 7:22 PM · Permalink · Report

That's true.

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Cavalary (11445) on 8/14/2014 8:19 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

Speaking of pseudonyms, how would this look submitted? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqwiQtS1Vbo&t=632 Since I just finished it... Lucky there is a video of the credits there...

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Indra was here (20756) on 8/15/2014 9:35 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

Prayer received. Added to Considered - Category: All / Policy / System - Policy - Developer Pseudonym. (will move to Credits section).

[Added on: August 16, 2014]

[Suggested by: Patrick Bregger]

Change policy to accept pseudonyms (i.e. entity/entities in the contribution wizard) as developers. The current policy is to accept only real names and to a certain extent, stage names for musicians. Although somewhat possible via Google, there is no way to search for developer pseudonyms internally.

Issues: Some pseudonyms cannot be effectively searched via Google, such as common single words.