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My reflection (see kibbitz at bottom of link) on a recent loss leads me to think about how we judge chess positions and then how we judge ourselves as chess players, chess variant designers and how we judge the people we play against and other chess variant designers.

This post started as a question for chess players - what processes of thought do you go through when you play chess? - and expanded into a question for chess variant designers - how do you invent chess variants? I begin to suggest a relationship between person as chess player and the same person as chess inventor...There are many excellent chess variant inventors who are not good at playing the variants they invent. But the relationship between what we are capable of doing and what we are capable of knowing is usually imbalanced, so that is no surprise. It's actually more surprising to me when a great chess variant inventor turns out to be a great chess variant player too. There is no reason why the inventor of a complicated piece can not understand all its implications yet not be adept at playing it. The most famous player of old arcade games such as Pacman liked to boast, quite truthfully, that he knew more about the game of Pacman better than the people who invented it. (The inventors of Pacman themselves vouched for him on that.)

Not really surprising! No reason the inventor of a form should be able to exemplify the ways that form can be explored; no reason the inventor of a tennis racquet and net should be able to demonstrate or understand the best technique for playing tennis, why the inventor of the sonnet form should have foreseen how poets would explore it. The game always has a life of its own, so to speak.

What standard patterns of thought do you go through when you consider what to play? (in a game of chess or when deciding what chess variant to play?) How do you arrive at a decision when you are playing a game like chess? What's your technique you go through as a chessplayer? How do you think when you are playing chess? What does your mind think about when you look at a move? When can you let sheer intuition guide you and when do you need to calculate sequences? How often do you play moves because they 'look good'? How far in advance do you feel it necessary to calculate during which phases of the game? Do you have standards for any given position of what you must think through?

To what extent do you feel familiarity with pieces allows you to feel comfortable playing a chess variant? (For me, a new piece is incredibly hard to learn. I must review it again and again.) How do you avoid forgetting sequences of moves? How do you approach the opening, middle game and endgame. How often do you need to weigh the relative values of the pieces? When you play an opening, how often are you already thinking about what the endgame might look like?

In what way do you relate to familiarity as a chess player? FIDE Chess is deeply familiar to many of us and I think that helps make us feel comfortable when playing it. Do you enjoy playing games that mutate FIDE Chess with slight rule changes? If so, why or why not?

Many are here because they regard FIDE as boring (because of its great familiarity) or too difficult to be competitive because of all the theory already associated with it. Believe it or not, these precise attributes make FIDE more exciting for me. The great familiarity of the board, set up, and pieces gives one the illusion that it is masterable, which is a motivating conceit (I look at the FIDE board and set aside the wisdom of experience and I say to myself, 'Ha! I should be able to master this!'). The massive amount of theory makes me feel like if I put in enough effort, I can master it and it also makes me think about the relationship between logic and creativity, between what we collectively know and what we still have to learn, the known and the unknown. If there is still so much room for growth and learning in FIDE chess that the greatest players in the world can be handily defeated by computers, that's impressive because it means despite all our theory, there's a lot we still don't understand about it. [Some see variants as a refuge from computers - I don't believe there's a single area of human intelligence immune from encroaching AI superiority - we are swiftly coming upon the technological singularity - if anything, chess variants exploration will only aid AI in its development.]

The opposite perspective: I find that many people do not like to explore variants because they don't like to explore unfamiliar things. But that is a shame because chess variants introduce old concepts in new ways, concepts that are deeply familiar to us as human beings. I have also found that many people are afraid of exhibiting weakness in themselves and they do not play variants because they are afraid to lose more. A chess variant can be a leveler of skill, not just by throwing out theory but by introducing concepts that may induce variable degrees of facility. To 'know' and to 'do' are very different and it's even very different to 'know how to do' (theoretical and logical) and to 'be able to do' (sporting and practical). How important is winning to you? Do you have to feel like you are thoroughly familiar with the rules and the pieces and have a good chance to win before you'll experiment with a new chess variant? I am not so demanding of myself (I don't have the expectation that I will perform well or proceed with great understanding when exploring new variants) and I think that gives me the opportunity to be more wide-ranging in my experience of chess variants which I find to be a consistent source of pleasure for me.

I would find it much easier to experiment if I weren't mostly confined to working through a computer screen, simply because I find that gives things a more prosaic air where manipulating objects is not as natural as being able to have a tactile relationship to actual chess pieces. It makes contact with the unfamiliar that much less familiar. I also end up focusing on certain variants that I enjoyed and then exploring them minutely. The interaction between familiarity and unfamiliarity is a key part of my continuing ability to appreciate chess variants.

Can playing chess variants help you to become a better chess (FIDE) player? By helping to illuminate technique? Will playing chess variants that mutate FIDE make you a worse chess (FIDE) player because of the habits of mind formed by thinking about small differences? On a rating of 1 - 10, 10 being the highest, how highly would you rate FIDE Chess as a chess variant? What criteria did you use to evaluate this? If not 10: What chess variants would you rate more highly than FIDE Chess?

Do you enjoy games that tweak FIDE Chess? Such games as are found among those by Dan Troyka and Adrian de la Campa. Some of these games draw appeal from forcing us to re-examine what is deeply familiar (FIDE chess pieces and set up) in a newly unfamiliar light. What about games that don't force us to re-examine FIDE chess but intensify FIDE chess slightly or a lot? I love some of those too maybe because they have familiarity as their starting point, so there is a strong foundation already there (Pocket Mutation Chess and Tripunch Chess are among those I consider to be in this category.)

Do you ever consider that when you invent a chess variant, you are following similar patterns of mind as you do when you actually play chess? That what you hope to get out of a chess variant as you are inventing it is a similar feeling to the feeling you get when you are playing a chess variant? Do you often feel competitive with other chess variant designers and do you see chess variant design itself as a type of competition?

What patterns of thought guide you when you design chess variants? Question for George Duke: Remind me - how did you invent the Falcon piece? What process did you go through to arrive at it?

How does anyone experience the creative process. Suppose logic were the opposite of creativity: What is the creativity - to - logic ratio involved for you when playing a game of chess? What about when inventing a game of chess?

I write these comments the way I tend to invent chess variants, sloppily and with constant revisions. Many of the variants in my oeuvre are truly crappy and will be deleted after I'm done experimenting with them and learning about what they have to offer. Some of them shouldn't have been submitted but at the time I submitted them, I was afflicted with the same sort of illusory euphoria that I sometimes have when I think I'm making a winning move but am really making a losing move (as I describe in a specific position at the link on the start of this set of inquiries and discussion). These variants do often spark the idea for better ones though or have singular forms or an aesthetic that goes beyond gameplay.

I created Tiling Rider Chess so that I could create an environment of unique tiling using Game Courier. I thought it was really fun to play for a while. It led to Hullabaloo soon eclipsed it in my mind. Apart from its own value, Tiling Rider Chess has a sort of value as an artifact in the development of other variants. Hullabaloo may be indicating something still more intriguing and playable, and may end up having a more artifactual signficance for me later. Some are gimmicky games, some are novelty games. Some of these gimmicks and novelties can of course be utilized in games that are themselves quite fun to play, apart from any such aspect - again, it's the familiarity interacting with the unknown to produce sustainable game play.