Rich Hutnik wrote on Sun, Oct 5, 2008 03:01 AM UTC:
I want to add a few comments for the night, before I end up going to sleep
here:
1. Any 'large organization with a large budget' that proposes to wrestle
away the chess community into something new, is one that wants to
completely take over the community itself, and have it for itself. You
can see this in what happened with the Capablanca variant that began with
G, and another that is a chess variant I know with a movable board (the guy thinks he will own the chess world, and his board is the future) and others. Such an individual or organization doing it is doing it either out of some power trip for personal glory, or the belief there is so much money in it, that they are going to stomp out the competition. Is this something people here want to deal with, or would you rather input into the process collectively and hit some middle ground that all stakeholders can buy into. This would be an open-source project.
2. As for 'why not just have a collection of variants like we have now,
and no do some NextChess'. Well, how is this working? Is what we have
now here nothing more than just an monsterously large collection of
discrete games? Is it resulting in the building up of anything? Is such
resulting in us getting any commercial equipment to buy? Is it viable?
Or, do people want to rationalize how it is GREAT to end up making your
own pieces, cutting off pieces here and there, and gluing them back
together? Or, how about using Seirawan Chess pieces in ways the designer
of the game objects to, because they don't make elephant pieces? In a
nutshell, is this working. Anyhow what I am saying with 'NextChess' is
NOT that it should replace all these variants out there, but it could be a
way to act as a way for all these variants to work together and enhance one
another.
3. On a practical level, IAGO wants to have tournaments in physical
locations using actual pieces. At this point, pieces to do chess variants
are not available really anywhere in a way that people can acquire them. I
have practical reasons for standards. Also, there will be an interest in
holding chess variants tournament, and working towards having a world
champion of chess variants. The idea of just picking a single game and
doing that way isn't as effective then taking chess variants as a
category unto itself, and enabling a champion to emerge.
4. It has been shown that standards are how you get anything to take off.
Now, you can end up having these standards shoved down the throats of
people by some power on high, who has bucks, or you can agree to reach
them. The former is the Borg, and the later is the Federation. If you
don't want to work to having standards, then you will get stuff shoved
down your throat. Who here wants the Knight+Rook combo piece to be an
elephant, and a Knight+Bishop to be a hawk? Well, unless you care to work
on this and agree, it is entirely possible that, because they are the only
pieces for sale that have this, the pieces would get that name. Expect
that to happen if the Seirawan group decides, for financial reasons,
people can use their pieces in variants. From an IAGO perspective, it
wouldn't mind that happening, because at least there is SOMETHING for
sale out there. Well, let me say from my take on what I feel IAGO needs
to do, it makes sense. Boards and committees would formally decide this.
5. The standards should always be between games and for translation
purposes and when you decide to have two different designs mash together,
for example. It also enables people to understand what the heck one is
talking about in their game, when describing it. When wanting to discuss
and compare pieces, then you need standards for this.
6. I do understand that designers can call something anything they like. However, a game being viable is no only designers creating, but also a community of players who play. It is a dialog between the two. Standards help with the communications. Also, when you get standards, you allow people to specialize. You get people who are good at designing pieces types just working on those. You also get people who are good at combining pieces together in games to do that, and so on.
7. What was stated about FIDE is what I have been looking to address.
Unless there is some way to enable to have the FIDE Chess crowd and
variant community be able to communicate, you aren't going to get much
recognized here, and possible expansions to take place. Both sides need
to recognize and work together, then you may have something.