Review Submitted By: Mark Phillips
Author Status: Staff member
Started on TriadCity: 1999
Submission Date: Sep 9, 2012
TMC Listing: TriadCity
The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Mark Phillips]
and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.
I'm one of the developers of TriadCity, so take my bias into account.
TriadCity was founded to answer the question, 'What if you take the
text-based MUD/RPG genre seriously as literature?' We wanted to figure
out what narrative techniques and styles of characterization would make
sense in a medium which is by definition social, but at the same time is
compressed into a computer screen. We've kept some of the defining
genre traditions: you can still go around killing monsters. But, we've
re-shaped those familiar pieces and subsumed them within a very
different kind of fictional experience than has been typical of earlier
MUDs.
The world is different. Instead of deriving from the traditional
sources of DnD and Tolkien, we've based TriadCity on the 'universal
city' idea of Modernist literature, especially Eliot's 'The Waste
Land'. In TriadCity all cities of western culture and all historical
epochs are present simultaneously, along with fantastic and surreal
elements, blended together inside a framework which is essentially
satirical. The fun of this is that we can ambitiously set out to take
snotty pokes at absolutely everything, and have a reasonably coherent
structure for doing that.
Player interactions are different. For example, we can impose various
forms of subjectivity on character experience. Your character and mine
may walk into a room together, and perceive that space differently,
either subtly or radically depending on the intent of the author who
created it. We don't know of that ever being done anywhere else.
Violence exists but is not privileged as a path to character growth.
Death is permanent. There are unique roles such as Malopath, a kind of
psychic vampire. Characters can advance by contributing to the game
world, but that's not mandatory and nobody forces you. There's a lot of
sophisticated AI going on, although it's intended to further our
fictional purposes and is for the most part not shoved up your nose.
The game world presents a high degree of cultural allusiveness, but
doesn't demand a PhD.
We started TriadCity in 1999. Since then we've watched the mega-success
of 3-D graphical MMOGs, especially World of Warcraft and Second Life.
Although we very much admire a lot of the user-generated content in SL,
we find the cartoonishness of the graphical experience off-putting. For
us, our own ability to form excellent pictures in imagination is so much
more powerful and fulfilling. We don't think this makes TriadCity
retro. We think it makes it better. We frequently attract refugees
from these cartoon worlds. They're very welcome.
There are a lot of down sides. The project is a commercial failure,
thus we have only a very small volunteer group adding content and
programming. There's nearly always work going on, but, compared with
Blizzard's ability to throw a gazillion developers into adding new
continents to WoW, forget about it. There are 17,000+ rooms in
TriadCity today, but the world is just beginning to be fleshed out
enough to sortof start to see how it all fits together. There's so much
context missing that a lot of the features existing today really kinda
make no sense. They will. But, maybe not this week.
It can be a rough ride for newbies. Really depends who's on with you.
If nobody's there, which is often the case, good luck to ya. We're
adding an optional opening tutorial which we hope will help with the
rudiments of game mechanics and character maintenance. If you're
familiar with the MUD tradition this'll be easier. If you're coming
from an Interactive Fiction background, you may fail to get the parser
working.
The good news is there's a vibrant long-term core of wonderful players
who understand this world and love being part of it. Become familiar
with them and they'll make your experience great. A lot of the writing
is excellent. The place pops with inventiveness and great ideas. More
than half the players are women. We're taught in university courses and
are cited in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism as their
culminating example of postmodernist literature. Shoot an email to
info@smartmonsters.com and we'll answer your questions.
Thanks! Meet you in the City some day soon.
