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Actually, from what I've seen, there is a lot of truth to it, but less so now than previously, I think. The standard attitude among chess teachers was that variants are bad because they take valuable training time away from learning FIDE. Now bughouse is fairly popular at chess clubs. I saw it being played a decade or so ago myself. And I've heard (read) that other FIDE-like games are being played a little. Plus the internet has opened up the world of variants to the world, if anyone bothers to look for it. So I do think we will see more variants being played. And I also think, for what that's worth, playing variants does improve your FIDE game - at least, most variants, because you need "chess thinking" to play them. There are variants which take you so far from standard chess you are no longer using chess thought, or just chess thought, to play the games.

I just find the monolithic dedication to one version of a game kind of boring and the smorgasbord of new variations and ideas on here more fun. I'm glad to know FIDE's simmered down, though. All the more reason to not take people like that one guy who writes for mindsports.nl seriously. The idea that inventing games is "excluded from human progress" is too cynical and toxic to belong in any mindsports community. When you take into account that video games, board games, and wargames are updated all the time, that notion becomes even more ridiculous. I'm not saying Chess should be updated or anything like that. There have been many people who've tried to update chess, and aside from maybe Chess960, none of their attempts have caught on... yet.

Almost 20 years ago Tim Harding said what Wyatt van Dyke holds again now, that reform in Chess will come about this century. It is similar to religious fundamentalists who say in every generation the end is near but not right away, just soon enough to get donations.

Transcendental_Prelate. Harding is columnist for Chess Cafe, and the above article appeared on Chess Cafe; but it was so long ago it is poorly formatted to tell. After Harding's article in the nineties, Chess Cafe dropped topic of CVs, not by conspiracy but for vested Simplemindedness. Anyway Chess Variants get liberally discussed at other OrthoChess site ChessBase. The problem with ChessBase is that their indexing is so bad, it is difficult to find the 30 or even 50 times CVs have come up in a serious way, buried as the subject of reform is in interviews and history. Accesible at ChessBase in full articles are CVs FRC, Option, Switch Side, Tandem Pawn, Shogi, Seirawan Chess, maybe Capablanca and Xiangqi also.

Here's the quintessential conspiracy requiring Orthodox Chess masters: Turk, presaging AI.

I didn't really give a timeframe, but I was thinking centuries plural rather than century singular.

Wyatt Van Dyke's reference to video games is a good analogy, but it explains why new games are very fun (sometimes even more so) but perhaps not always catching on as an "official" sport.  It's difficult to compare players and have leagues, etc. with so many different games... sort of why arena football never really took off. 

Having said that, I do think they should have a "decathlon" tournament with rapid and blitz chess, then 8 of the most popular/worthwhile variants.  A round robin would be cool, but it'd take a while to cover all the variants.

 

Jeffery, I think you're on to something really, really cool which could potentially inject some life into the CV community. However, I think we're going off-topic, so I'm going to create a new subject.