Anonymising pp contest entries?

["Ron Hale-Evans" <rwhe@...>]

At 9:57 PM -0700 5/28/2002, JT Thomas wrote:
>BTW, Ron I have some concern that there will be some bias conscious or
>otherwise in the contest due to knowing the entrants

You don't have to worry about _conscious_ bias; Marty and I will make every
attempt to be fair.  If you think we won't, however, I advise you not to
enter the contest, because if you lose, you'll complain of bias, and if you
win, you won't be able to feel good about it.  (Marty says that if you
think she at least doesn't have the capacity to be brutally frank about the
work of someone she knows, you don't know her very well.  :-)  After all,
as an editor, objective criticism is her profession.  And I, Ron, having
just been the subject of her tender mercies in green pen on my _Games
Journal_ article, can attest to this.)

As for unconscious bias...

>is there anyway to
>anonymize (sp?) the entries? Should this become part of the judging/entry
>process? Is this already accounted for?

The "Time Marches On" contest was not anonymous, and we have modelled the
"Ludic Synergy" contest on it closely.  Sincw we did not specify an
anonymising process in the rules, it seems a bit late to put the egg back
in the shell.  At the moment, we have already received one entry, and have
a general idea about who will be doing two other entries, because the
entrants needed to ask us if some particular game qualified as a game
system.  That means we can definitely put names to one of the entries, and
probably put names to two more, even if the latter come to us anonymised.

As long as the piecepack community remains small, it's likely that judges
will be able to recognise the authors of anonymous entries by their styles,
in any case.  However, as the community becomes larger, we may want to
adopt some of the procedures of the annual Interactive Fiction Contest
<http://www.ifcomp.org/>.  I don't know what those procedures are; can
someone enlighten us?

The upshot is that we're trying to be fair, we understand your concern,
it's a valid issue, and future contests should probably take it into
account, but the cat's out of the bag,  the genie's out of the bottle, and
the worms are out of the can on this one.

Ron H-E

--
         Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe@... & rwhe@...
           Center for Ludic Synergy, Seattle Cosmic Game Night,
Kennexions Glass Bead Game &  Positive Revolution FAQ: http://www.ludism.org/
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    == You meet the most interesting people when you're a solipsist. ==