🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Sun, Oct 5, 2008 12:11 AM UTC:
There are some problems with coming up with standards. 1) If we enforced
them, it would alienate many game designers. 2) Enforcing them would be a
monumental task. 3) There are sometimes good thematic reasons for giving a
piece a new name, such as when I renamed the Vao for Yang Qi and Eurasian
Chess. 4) We wouldn't actually enforce the standards if we had them,
making them nothing more than ineffectual recommendations.
Besides these practical problems, the idea of having standards violates my
moral principle that game designers should be free to choose whatever
terminology they wish for their games. Of course, in a commercial product,
the marketing department might get some say on terminology. But we're not
commercial game publishers. We're an archival project that catalogs the
variety of Chess variants without rewriting them to fit our own
standardization.
Although I am morally opposed to a full-scale standardization project, I
do believe it is good to educate people about the history of pieces and
other concepts, and I believe it is useful to have and advocate a common
vocabulary about some things. For example, I advocate the awareness of
terms like leaper, rider, and hopper to describe certain types of pieces.
I also favor categorization of games. In general, I favor standardization
on a meta-language for discussing Chess variants, but I oppose enforcing
standards on what game designers choose to call things within the context
of their own games.
