Gary:

You said (in response to my prior post):
I'm almost certain that you KNOW that your statement is untrue so it isn't worth a real rebuttal but I'll do a small one just in case. If you had chess where a pawn could ONLY move one space forward instead of 1 or 2 on the first move and it ONLY captured one space forward instead of diagonally could be MUCH more easily explained than the real rules for chess. But you certainly wouldn't call that just 'chess' and the correct version of chess 'multi-move-pawn chess'. Anyway, I assume that you were just being funny there.

My reply:
My original statement IS true. You got it backwards. The version you describe is a variant of chess (and it’s valid) and could be called multi-move-pawn-chess. No change would be made to chess.


You said:
What I am trying to do is DEFINE what constitutes a valid variant such that programming time should be spent to create that variant. It is VERY obvious that NO site owner would create SOME of the variants that you have described above. A FEW of them are probably VERY good and viable! It is ALSO very obvious that we would be WAY of out line if we were to pass a law forbidding you to play those variants at all at any time.

Does that make sense? There is a BIG difference between a reasonable variant on a site and a reasonable variant that someone might play with their friends (like your MASH checkers variant that I found hilarious!).

My reply:
I think you’re getting off track here. Whether or not a game should be programmed for online play is contingent on one’s access to the proper hardware and software, knowledge of programming or access to someone with the knowledge, access to a domain, freetime for development, etc. You’ll never come up with a definition that takes all this into account. Plus there’s the change in technology to take in to account. That will change what games we can and cannot implement for online play.


You said (in response to my prior post):
I respectfully disagree. If a variant confuses beginning players such that they think that the variant is the actual rules for the mainstream game, then in my opinion, it is an invalid variant. It is the new and beginning players such as Harley that we are the most concerned about.

My reply:
The only way I can see that a variant would mislead players into thinking it was the ‘real thing’ is if it were misnamed as IYT has done with Pente & Pro Pente.


I said:
Why can't a variant 'negatively impact the ability of one side or the other to win’?

You replied:
To be on a site, although IT CAN negatively impact one side's changes to win, it must be within reason or few players will play it.

My reply:
Oh, so a variant can 'negatively impact the ability of one side or the other to win’. That’s not what you said earlier.

Also, if a variant ‘must be within reason or few players will play it’, it logically follows that if many players play it, it’s within reason.

Ok, well, by that logic, a lot of players play fun-pente, which makes it a reasonable, i.e. valid variant!

Now I know you’re going to say that a lot of players started playing “pente” at IYT, thinking it was the official game, and that’s likely to be true, but they continue to play the game because it’s a valid game. If it weren’t valid, players would quit playing it in droves.


You said:
Pente and Keryo Pente are actually 2 completely separate games. While the strategy has some similarities, the difference in positions and attacking is quite significant. One is not a variant of the other.

My reply:
Geez! If they’re completely different games, then they should have completely different names!! Wasn’t Keyro Pente derived from Pente? How can you say it’s not a variant?!! Furthermore, strategies have nothing to do with whether or not a game is a variant of another as you have inferred above.


You said:
I am stating that a variant should not be created that is SO similar to the original game such that beginners confuse it for the correct way to play the game AND that variant substantially and negatively affects the ability of one side to win.

My reply:
Ok, so don’t name your variant the name of the game it was derived from. No problem. But don’t make a variant that’s more one-sided in terms of who wins? Why not. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing that.


You said:
My definition of an invalid variant ONLY applies to that which a reasonable site owner would spend programming time on.

My reply:
Well (1) your definition is weak because what you call reasonable and what I or Dmitri or Fencer or anyone else might call reasonable varies greatly. (2) You never said that your definition ONLY applied to certain things until now, because (3) your premise is flawed as I have said before, and now you are trying to change it to make it work.

By the way, if anyone does find a variant that fits your five criteria, will that mean that fun-pente is indeed a valid variant according to you? Or will it mean that there are two invalid variants being played online? In other words, if/when someone meets your challenge, will you admit that fun-pente is valid or will you simply state that since there’s already one invalid game out there, what the heck, there might as well be two.


I said:
A GAME (whether it’s a variant of another or not) may be valid or invalid depending of whether or not it’s winnable. Go-Moku played on a 4x4 grid would be invalid. There’s not enough room on the board to place five stones in a line and therefore, no way to win. Thus the game is invalid.

You replied:
That's a pretty narrow definition of a valid variant by most standards. If you said that, then I could say let's play Pente and here's the rules: 1. The first to get 2 in a row wins. -or- 2. The first to get 1 in a row wins.

My reply:
No, it’s a broad definition. Any game that is a spin-off of another game and winnable is a valid variant. Many variations that we could mention are valid according to the definition I’ve given because they’re spin-offs of another game and they’re winnable, but invalid if we apply your, now modified, five-part premise in which, lest we forget, we also need to consider it’s programmability by a reasonable site owner and it’s strategy in comparison to other relevant games.


You said:
But I will state my opinion about something else once again. That is that a variant IS INVALID if it is so substantially similar to the original game, meets all of the criteria that was outlined, it confuses beginning players into thinking that it is the correct version of the game, AND one side's chances of winning are strongly negatively impacted. It is the one-sidedness of a game that will NOT allow it to grow in the long run.

My reply:
As with my reference to a ‘reasonable’ programmer earlier in this post, who is to say what is ‘substantially similar’? What if I made a variation with a hole in the board in one place. If that hole were placed in the upper left corner of the board, where stones are rarely ever placed, then I think we’d all agree that my game would be ‘substantially similar’. Now, what if I moved the hole toward the center? Still substantially similar? What if I put it in the center? How about two holes? Or three? Nine? Twenty? My point here is that there’s no way to define ‘substantially similar’. The same thing applies to ‘strongly impacted’.


Note to all readers, I’ve tried to be complete, concise, & yet brief here. I tried to include only relevant text from earlier posts. Please read the earlier posts if you are unclear here. Also, I have tried not to take anything said earlier out of context or be misleading in any way. If I have, please understand that doing so was not my intention.

Gary, I haven’t addressed everything you said earlier. If you think I missed an important point, let me know.

Thad