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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: Finishing competition entries
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Subject: Re: Finishing competition entries
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Roger Carbol (rog@col.ca) wrote:
> > For heaven's sake, the competition has *nothing* to do with educational
> > grades. Different things being rated, different purpose for rating,
> > different standards of eligibility.

> Well gee Andrew, given that your game is the closest thing to an educational
> product out there, that might be a bit of a bold thing to say.

No, that's not what I mean at all. The content of my entry, or any other 
entry, has nothing to do with my claim.

In a class, students are being graded on how well they learn the subject 
matter. They are not competing with each other. The teacher is judging 
how much the students have learned, and (most importantly) it's for the 
students' benefit, to *tell* them how much they've learned. The grade is 
a rating of the student.

This competition is an opinion contest. It's for the *players'* benefits. 
I mean, the actual judging system is. The competition is of tremendous
benefit to the authors, but we the players are not *grading* the authors,
or how much they have learned, or how much potential they have to
transform 21st-century literature. At least, I'm not. I'm rating the
*games*, and *in competition* with each other, and I'm rating them by how 
well *I* like them. 

The difference between a popularity contest and a rating of learning is 
so great that I find it absurd to compare them.

Standards of eligibility are more of a difference between this competition 
and (say) the Oscar awards, which came up in another post. Anybody can 
enter this contest. The Oscars have a nomination system, so that all 
entries have a minimum (and quite high) standard of quality, or rather 
popularity. (And in an academic class, entrants are grouped into 
approximately equal levels of initial knowledge -- all the students have 
taken all the prerequisites, but none of them have passed *this* class 
before.)

> Then again, based on my intuition that you would have written Lists even
> if you had known that no other human being would ever load it, it might not
> be a bold thing to saw at all.

It's equally irrelevant, but your intuition is wrong. Just about
everything I create, I create with the intention that other people will
use it. It's been hell sitting on Lists for the six months or so that 
have passed since I wrote it.

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
