Changing Landscapes anonymisation

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

I emailed Karol at Mesomorph this morning.  As you may recall, she has
volunteered to anonymise the submissions for the Changing Landscapes
contest.  I suggested to her that in addition to stripping names off
submissions, cleaning up spelling, etc. she ought to reformat all of
them to PDF files of uniform appearance, much as she did with the
rulesets on the CD-ROM.  That way, everybody's submissions look much
more similar, no matter how they are submitted.  Also, no one will
have to go to any great lengths to disguise their submissions by
making them look different from the games they already have out there,
for example submitting Microsoft Word files when they usually create
games in HTML, etc.  (Graphic figures in the text might be an
exception.)  We can prepare our game submissions in the form we intend
to release them and make them look as nice as we want, so they're
ready to be released on the day the winner is announced, then Karol
will make them all look the same before Mike sees them.

Karol agreed this might be a good idea and suggested I contact Mike
Schoessow about it.  I was going to send this as personal mail to
Mike, but decided I should make the suggestion in a more open fashion,
so that the community can weigh in.

I just realised a side-benefit is that if Karol reproduces the games
in the Mesomorph house format, they'll also be just about ready to go
onto the Mesomorph CD-ROM and into the big book of rules on the same
day.

Does everybody understand what I am proposing when I talk about "PDF
files of uniform appearance" and the "Mesomorph house format"?  I'm
sure Karol can provide us with an example in the Files section of the
mailing list site, but if she's busy, I'll be happy to upload an
example from my copy of the CD.  Suffice it to say for now that
Mesomorph creates PDF files that have most of the fancy formatting
stripped out of the original document, and all of them look just about
the same, which is a good thing when you're trying to create one big
book, and a good thing for the contest too, IMHO.

Opinions?  Obviously, I would especially like to hear from Mike.

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/
Home page & Hexagram-8 I Ching Mailing List: http://www.apocalypse.org/~rwhe/