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Charles Gilman wrote on Thu, Mar 8, 2012 06:59 AM UTC:
Hubert
	You didn't say that originally, You just said that you don't read books by people who wrote a lot - which as I pointed out is pretty close to not reading any books. I know what kind of books you mean, but my opinion of them is lower than yours appears to be. Judging by the reviews that thbey occasionally get, they read more like successive drafts of the one book, with the settings changed slightly to see iof it makes it more plausible - which it never does. There certainly are contributors who post one page after another with only slight variations on the same basic game, but not only am I not one of them, I am one of their most outspoken critics.

Fergus
	The fact is, the entire site is like what you term a 'vanity press' - although I reserve that phrase for publishers who actually charge their writers. We are a small band of ordinary people. The wider public will not remember us for variants if they remember any of us for anything. My worst extamnt variant, Great Herd, is an old-style one, and was there because I was still newish and overestimated the merits of Herd itself.

In many cases, post-your-own pages are better than old-style ones in several ways:
	(1) If others point out amiguities in the text, problems in playability, inaccuracies in reference to other variants, unwittingly offensive content, or ways in which a variant could be made a lot better, the page can be amended very quickly. I am still waiting for my updates to three old-style pages to be posted.
	(2) If criticism gets to the point that even the inventor sees no merit in the game it can be withdrawn by replacing the text with a few lines explaining what went wrong - or in the long term replaced by something by their more mature self. We seem stuck with Great Herd forever.
	(3) They impose a standard presentation format that helps newcomers structure the description of their variant better. Some old-style pages, including some of my early efforts, are very unstructuired in comparison.
	(4) Where a contributor has both kinds of page, their PYOs will generally be better, as they will have been designed following helpful advice on their earlier attempts.

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