Can I run into legal issues with random names?
- by Nathan Sabruka
I'm currently building a game whose NPC's are going to be assigned a random gender and a random name for the right gender. To do this I will be using a "database" of names (actually a text file with tuples). There would also be a list of last names, which will be added to the first name also randomly.
My question is the following. Suppose one such random name is "George Bush", and this person has been randomly assigned the job of president. As you can see, this could easily be seen as having been "copied" from a real-life person.
The main issue is this. Names will be randomly-generated, yes, but the seed for random-number generation will be constant. In other words, the name of an NPC would be randomly-generated, i.e. I wouldn't choose it, but it would be the same for every player. Could this get me in trouble? We cannot verify all possible names, since the generated number of NPC's could be potentially limitless (new NPC's are being created whenever needed).
