Editing Games
Since Fish was the first into the blog (one of two...Mortadelo, yours is coming next), we're going to deal with his request first:

Editing games is a strange experience. It certainly isn't glorious: in fact, it's probably the least glorious job in the industry. Editors are probably the only creative on a design team who do not have any sort of industry award handed out each year. But the editor's job is argueably the most important but also the most easily overlooked - you'll know when a book is poorly edited, but if it is well-edited the writers get all the credit. In this way, being an editor is like being middle management; you are the guy who enables everyone else to look good and make the project run smoothly, but in the end it's the folks on one end or the other who get the glory.

I wouldn't call myself an experienced editor. I never edited a school paper, I never edited a book (other than Most Wanted - bad idea, editing your own stuff). But as a professional writer for over 5 years (god!), and a writer for 15, I like to think I can tell good writing from bad. I'm also a monster tech nitpicker, having playtested for a game company for years as a designer, and now testing software as part of my duties during my day job. That's a good start.

My approach to editing a game is a lot like writing a game, since you self-edit as you go. All of my editing principles extend from 4 basic beliefs:

• The first thing any game has to do is make sense to someone who knows nothing about it; I'm not talking about a guy who walks into a campaign book 15 books down the line and doesn't know the history, but rather that the ideas presented in the book are given a good context and have internal logical consistency, and the rules are decipherable with a minimum of effort.
  
• Second thing a book has to do is be useable. This is not a novel. It's a book that gets used on the fly, so you need to have clearly compartimentalized ideas - cross-referenced if need be - that can be quickly accessed by someone with a limited familiarity with the book. Good headers, chapter breaks, organization of ideas, sidebars, and fonts all are part of this principle.
  
• Thirdly, and maybe the most important, the book has to be readable. I once was told that there's no greater waste of time than reading a book you don't enjoy. This would explain why I got kicked out of English classes a lot in college, but it also tells you something about reader mentality. They want to get their money's worth out of this book, and being able to at least enjoy the reading part is key to that. The importance of this is compounded by the amount we shell out per book - $6 on a bad paperback is one thing, but $25 on a shitty set of rules and amateurish text is nigh-unforgivable. As an editor, you have to look at each and every sentence and say to yourself, 'Have I seen this idea before? Where? Does it make sense here? Why? Can I read this and get the idea the author wanted to communicate? If not, how do I fix that? If I fix it, how do I do that without disrupting the rest of the text?' And so on, and so on, and so on. So you go along, reading out loud to yourself, thinking, digesting, trying to reorganize then undoing, and on and on.
  
• Fourthly, the text should always have a carrot, not a stick. More of a design principle than anything, this statement recognizes that you are editing a game and not a technical manual. Games are about options, and the authors should not railroad players into a single obvious course of action at any point. The carrot is that everything should be intriguing on some level - what Scott has called the "I want that" response - and promote freedom of choice for the GM and the player. This is most often a mechanical principle, but it also extends to text that narrowly defines or limits a group or option (for instance, saying 'All members of this group are disgustingly evil child rapists who feed on widows for fun and profit and will be hunted down without mercy by anyone not of their alignment' does not promote choice or picque interest in play). Every piece of text needs to have a 'thing' that really makes you get excited - otherwise, it doesn't belong in the book.
  

The hardest thing about editing is understanding the text you are working on is not yours. You need to make changes without disrupting the other guy's ideas. It's like walking in a minefield - the writer thinks his stuff is great (I mean, you never send something you're not happy with, right?), and it's up to the editor to make changes without a) totally adulturing the text and b) pissing off the writer or c) losing the spirit of the text or of the writer's voice. I believe that the best thing you can hear from a reader is they can't tell the changes you made, when in actuality, you have. This is an affirmation that you have translated what the reader may have once made sense in his head into something that makes sense on paper.

If you want to edit games, you'll need a few things:

• One, knowledge of the language. You need to know the language the game is written in very well, with an ear for what sounds good.
  
• Two, knowledge of the system. This makes game editing doubly hard, because you have to know 2 very complicated sets of rules. You need to understand as much of the system as possible. In a system like Spycraft, you'll need to know all the books reasonably well; in a campaign setting, you need to know history, setting details, and so on. You are the safety trying to catch all the loopholes and missing pieces and fill them in.
  
• Three, time. Editing takes a lot of time. A LONG time, sometimes. When I started, I averaged 1 page of edits per hour. Now, I'm new at this so I'm sure I'd eventually get faster, but you have to go in expecting the worst. You'll find yourself tweaking and tweaking sometimes, especially the first time through.
  
• Four, patience. Editing is an exercise in patience and your ability to concentrate. After hours of staring at a screen or page, the letters will start to blend and shift, but you need to keep it up. You have to read through a lot of text sometimes to find the little mistakes, reading time and again and remaining as critical of your own work as you are of the writer's.
  
• Five, a velvet glove cast in iron. Don't pussyfoot around or let relationships control how much you edit something. If the text needs hammering, hammer it; if you need rewrites, say so. The book's sales will depend upon some of the decisions you make, and you need to make those decisions with confidence and always in the best interest of the book.
  
• Six, distance. Editing your own stuff is not a good idea - extra eyes almost always make a better book. If you are getting frustrated with text, put it aside. You must remain at all times above and outside of the work, so you can make the hard decisions you have to make in its best interest.
  

OK! So all of this said, you won't be prepared for editing. It ain't pretty, it ain't glorious, but it certainly is necessary - far more so than most designers care to admit or acknowledge. If you are masochistic enough to try this for a living/supplemental income, you will need to get yourself a few things; some classes in editing will help you identify common mistakes, and can make the process a little more transparent. I would also recommend attending as much of Malhavoc Press's Gencon Indy editing sessions as you can (they are run by Monte's wife, whose name escapes me at the moment); these are cheap, specialized crash courses every day of the show that give you the tips you need to survive. I would also recommend investing heavily in aspirin and caffeine, not necessarily in that order. That is all.