Quote: "Why should anyone be denied entry into this competition simply because they've got a history of computer game programming. Isn't that why we are all here?"
Having prior skill is vastly different from having prior work to use, after all this is ultimately a programming competition, so the media being made previously isn't really an issue, especially when the user can just use other people's free media, or things they've bought(both of which can usually be accessed by anyone). And in general, game media and specific routines within a game's code are reusable so I have no issue with their reuse, but a game isn't reusable, only game engines.
Quote: "No one should be penalized, simply because they have a history of being a good, active game developer in the community. Ultimately, that is what everyone is here, trying to do.
It would be like trying to stop programmers entering, simply because they are experienced programmers."
No, it would be like having some wilderness survival challenge, except some members went there several months in advance and have already built castles with fully sustainable food and water sources. While other people are given a knife and some flint and then we see how many waves of bears they can each survive.
What you said is also a bad thing to new programmers, or ones unfamiliar with the language, because they won't have all this experience or mountains of unfinished projects all with game ready media, and code to handle them. So to add to my analogy: the people with the flint and knife would be average joes who have only seen a few episodes of Bear Grylls whereas the others have been building castles all their lives.
When I began using DarkBASIC I began loads of small projects to test out cool ideas, but I didn't really have any advanced programs that were near competition, so starting a new project wasn't really that hard. But now that I've done this for 8+ years I have so many projects I don't even know where half of them are stored, so yes, I think allowing me to enter some of these is incredibly unfair.
Quote: "The deadline given can simply be thought of as a timeframe for uploading games, not for developing games"
Which is exactly why allowing games that have been in development before the contest start is a bad thing. 2 months isn't a long time to make a game and all the assets for it, it would make far more sense for any entrant to simply enter a game they've already made or are currently working on, and maybe change a few things. In fact, why not just make the competition span 2 weeks? I have a bunch of games I can enter without much effort. Or rename the compo to:
'Who has the coolest project right now?'
Quote: "All I'd do to get around this, is not tell you how long I've been working on it for."
But that would be cheating, which would be a very different can of worms. If you're going to use this as a reason for not disallowing such games then you might as well just remove a bunch of other rules, such as the
'no using stuff you have no right to', because I can just recolour someone's textures, remove the watermark and you probably wouldn't know. But that still makes it cheating, there's a very big difference between exploiting loopholes to gain an advantage and actually doing something that's disallowed; doing the later makes you a dick, and that alone will stop the majority of people, especially ones who respect a good competition.
The rules also state:
Quote: "19. Game Apps must run at 1024 x 600 resolution (Netbook res)."
Which isn't the only resolution used by the Atom netbooks, you can even see a list of resolutions in their validation guidelines:
http://appdeveloper.intel.com/en-us/article/validation-guidelines#UIX01