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Check out Chess with Different Armies, our featured variant for July, 2024.
Check out Chess with Different Armies, our featured variant for July, 2024.
To an extent, I can understand why you do what you do here. Like me, you like to create systems, and you find enough intrinsic pleasure in the act of designing that the use of the design can become immaterial. I spent yesterday, for example, programming a command that will be useful primarily for 3D games--even though I have hardly played 3D games in my life and might not have any personal use for the command. But I thought someone would find it useful, and I enjoyed the process of designing it. I may at least program one 3D game with it as a showpiece. To an extent, we share common design interests, as we both design Chess variants.
But we part ways when it comes to how much we care about the utility of what we design. I care more about the utility of my designs than you care about yours. I program and play my games, whereas you cast yours adrift to be ignored while you go on to create new games. I program code that helps people play games with each other, whereas you make lists of piece names used by practically no one but yourself for games no one plays anyway, not even you.
I don't care so much whether or not you continue to make your lists of piece names. What I object to is lending them credibility by hosting them here without any disclaimers about what you are doing. It can give the false impression that we stand by and support what you are doing, and people coming across your pages may think, simply for not knowing any better, that you are providing official names for these pieces that have the support and acceptance of the Chess variant community. This problem does not come up with posting games, because it is normally understood that games are the creations of individual inventors. But your piece pages have the air of being official references, which they most definitely are not. Putting a prominent disclaimer at the top of each of your piece pages should fix this problem. I'll suggest something like this:
DISCLAIMER: This page is not an official reference provided by the Chess Variant Pages. It is the personal project of one contributor, whose opinions are his own and do not necessarily belong to anyone else associated with this site.