I just got a letter from someone whose real name is one of the pseudonyms that got used for a ShuffleComp entry that is hosted on my website. The ShuffleComp entry is showing up in search results for his name and he’d like me to take it down.
I wouldn’t mind helping this person out, but I don’t want to just take the entry down, and anyway I don’t think that would particularly help his search results as the entry is mentioned lots of other places. Advice? Should I ask the author for a non-pseudonymized version?
This seems like a somewhat unreasonable request? Names are not unique, so it’s pretty common for search results to include hits for multiple people with the same name. I guess the fact that it’s a pseudonym makes it seem less legit, but as long as the author wasn’t intending to impersonate the real person, I don’t see anything wrong with keeping it as is.
On the other hand, it can’t hurt to notify the author and let them decide whether to re-release the game non-pseudonymized.
The name under which a game was originally released is a simple bibliographic fact, which ideally should be permanently associated with it. (Eg. A Long Glass of Sherbet is generally credited to “Graham Nelson, writing as Angela M Horns”, or similar.) In my view this holds even if the game is later released under a different name.
I suppose that if the author particularly wanted to suppress a pseudonymous release, then the community might choose to respect that. But I don’t see that your correspondent has any standing in the matter.