Narrators should be able to work though issues like that. Masking a player's identity in a game...just not sure what the value of that would be.

A Narrator often needs to be able to communicate with a Player using the various chat features now available in Storium. How would Narrator-Player comms work if the Player's ID was blocked?

Part of the job of a Narrator is the requirement to manage his or her players. "Bias" is, alas, quite often a subset of knowledge...the more you understand a person or thing, the more likely your biases are to change. And not all biases are bad, either. Knowing from past experience that a certain Player always waits until the last minute until they make their move may produce a useful type of bias wherein a Narrator knows better than to issue a particular challenge to that Player requiring it to be completed prior to other players making their moves.

I don't have a problem with narrators who are biased toward their friends. I don't like them, but I don't think they're doing anything against the rules. If I noticed what I thought was overt bias, I'd just retire if it really bugged me, and avoid that narrator in the future.

There's no "winning the game" that a narrator is preventing by being biased. Players who find themselves stuck as the odd one out while the narrator and close friends play aren't being cheated out of any victory, and there is no way to enforce "be equally fair to all characters and only judge them by their posts." (Even if there were... does that mean judging them on their grammar as well as plot actions?) There is no objective way to measure "character play quality."

I don't think it's a good idea to remove narrators' ability to avoid players they've met and disliked in other games. I suspect that hiding usernames would just result in more "my friends only" games, where narrators are unwilling to take a chance on strangers who might not fit.

Or there'd be a lot more "check out this g'doc and SEND EMAIL to get into the game."

I'm having a really hard time seeing any good reason for narrators to not know who is applying to their games. Part of what makes Storium fun/workable is discovering/building a group of people with similar/compatible ideas about how to play. To just take in players on the basis of character submissions seems like hiring someone based on their resume without ever meeting, let alone interviewing them.

I think this is a terrible idea. There are good players and bad players and sometimes who is playing a character is as important as who the character is.