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George Duke asks:

Why does regular Chess have on the order of 10^4 to 10^6 times more followers than chess variantism does?

Followers want leadership, and the Chess world gives them that. Chess variants attract a kind of pioneering individual who is averse to being a follower. We're the Daniel Boones of the Chess world, scouting ahead where the masses of followers still fear to tread.

I think CVers share in the blame for their isolation and outcast status, because the prolificist way of making CVs has only come to fruition since 2000 with Internet facility. As a result, excellent games like Rococo do not get played.

I dealt with the outcast status bit in another message. I was going to answer that Rococo is doing fairly well. 21 games of it have been completed on Game Courier, which is better than most games, but 16 of those games were played by you. Most of the ongoing games of Rococo are also yours. So why isn't it doing better than it is? And is proliferation the cause of this? I'll deal with the first question first. There are a few reasons Rococo is not so popular. (1) Its inventors are not actively promoting it. (2) Its an Ultima variant, and I expect most Chess variant players prefer games with capture by displacement. In fact, while David and Peter were working on Rococo, I began working on my own Ultima variant, but I found myself so uninterested in Ultima-style games I never bothered to release it. (3) Rococo is too recent to have ever gained much of a following.

Now for the second question. Is proliferation the cause of people not playing Rococo? If we look at the games doing better than Rococo on Game Courier, most are older, more established games. A few are newer. Of these, one has been heavily played by its inventor, and a couple more seem to have achieved some genuine degree of popularity. Would people play Rococo more if there was less proliferation? I can't answer that. But I think it is unlikely that it would be played much more. Several of the players on Game Courier are game inventors trying out their own games. If they weren't here proliferating, they might not be here playing games either. And many others here are playing a large number of different games. It seems that Game Courier attracts people who are interested in variety and creativity. Yes, there are a lot of games, and if there were fewer games, some might get played more than they are now. But all this affects is the popularity of individual games. The important thing is that many games are being played, many more than were being played in the 1990's. This is good for Chess variants in general even if it spreads the wealth among games instead of more easily enabling a selected few to rise in popularity.