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Rich Hutnik wrote:

I do appreciate what you are saying as each game being a standalone game with its own flavor, and arguably each one being a 'work of art' in its own right.

I spoke of individual games having their own character. I did not say anything about them being works of art, despite your quotation marks around the phrase 'work of art.' Whether or not a game is a work of art has no bearing on the point I was making. Some may just be experiments or products of evolution. My point was that what I like about variants is too wide and far-ranging to be distilled into a single variant.

My concern about this is that it makes each game a deadend that can't be picked up and tweaked the way Chess has to spawn variants.

Some variants have been tweaked. Capablanca's Chess has been succeeded by variants correcting its flaws. Grand Chess has been followed by Grander Chess. Some variants have influenced the design of newer variants. Grand Chess influenced Eurasian Chess, which in turn has influenced Wildeurasian Qi. Some of my own games have come about by tweaking some of my older games. Grand Cavalier Chess was an improvement on Cavalier Chess. Eurasian Chess was a modification of Yang Qi. It wouldn't be difficult to enumerate more examples. Nothing is impeding the flow of ideas. The individuality of games is not standing in the way of creativity.

The community doesn't end up owning the game and collectively tweaking it to its wishes.

I'm not a communist. So I don't understand how this is a bad thing. Besides, it's not like anyone is stopping the community from exercising its collective wishes. Maybe it has more to do with the community not actually having clear, focused collective wishes regarding chess variants.

It is a take it or leave it, which ends up resulting in a bunch of games that have their own followings, but not enough to reach a critical mass to support mass adoption.

This has more to do with the secure position of Chess, not with games having individual creators.

There is also egos at stake where one designer or another jockeys for position to have their game as 'the next chess'. I have dealt with such individuals on the commercial level, who have staked their financial lives on it, and it isn't pretty. I could name multiple of them, and then ask if any of their games have a following here.

Not all inventors are of one mold. Some have focused on marketing one game. Others have created one game after another, not with the intention of finding the next Chess, but just for the sake of creativity or experimentation, or from inspiration from the muse. Many of us are just not trying to replace Chess, and the failure to do something we're not trying to do anyway should not be the standard for judging our efforts.

I also believe we should have some form (or several forms) that allow the community to give feedback and we evolve a design we can get enough people to play that has a critical mass behind it that it could get adopted and we get some neat byproducts of this, like commercial equipment being made to be able to play (you finally get variant pieces... YIPPIE).

We're not going to get a critical mass behind any game at this site. This site attracts the creative and the curious. This is the hub of creativity in the variant world, not the place where standardization or critical masses are to be found. You want critical mass behind a game? Pick one and promote it heavily. You're not going to get a critical mass here among the innovators. You're only going to get it among people who are not sufficiently interested in making their own games or in trying out multiple games. Trying to get it here is like herding cats.

Also, I already have variant pieces, simply because some capitalists took an interest in some variants and produced commercial sets.