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How to Play TriadCity The TriadCity Players' Guide Introduction By Poobah, Grand Marshal and President For Life, TriadCity Pancreatic League TriadCity is a new beginning for an old tradition, if that's not a totally pompous thing to say. MUDs and other forms of online interactive role-playing have existed since before the beginning of measurable time. We're told they're fun, but they're not what interest us. My Pancreatic colleagues and I seek to explore systematically the notion that these games can be stretched, as it were, into something similar, but different: new forms of fiction with their own structures, techniques, and characteristic idioms. So this is our role: inventors of these techniques and idioms. Fortunately we're very ably assisted by our good friends at SmartMonsters, particularly Mark, who teams closely with me to code the technological marvels underlying the fabric of the TriadCity universe, as he likes to put it. We began working together about five years ago, and since that time I'm no longer certain how I ever could have gotten along without him. The Players' Guide you're reading exists because there aren't enough Pancreatics for us to be able to personally educate the increasing numbers of adventurers and other tourists who visit our City. I do hope, though, to have the chance to meet all of you personally. Just page me next time you're on, and we'll chat. Like just about everything Triad, this Guide has begun as a sparse approximation of what it'll eventually become. We'll enhance it iteratively, as necessity dictates, or as the Muse inspires. Please check back often to see what's new. Welcome to the City! ~pooh Players' Guide TOC     © 2013 SmartMonsters, Inc. All Rights are Reserved. "Two of the most common approaches [to academic study of] adventure games seem to be apologetics and trivialization. Both generally fail to grasp the intrinsic qualities of the genre, because they both privilege the aesthetic ideals of another genre, that of narrative literature, typically the novel. For the apologists, adventure games may one day -- when their Cervantes or Dickens comes along -- reach their true potential, produce works of literary value that rival the current narrative masterpieces, and claim their place in the canon. For the trivialists, this will never happen; adventure games are games, they cannot possibly be taken seriously as literature nor attain the level of sophistication of a good novel. Although the trivialists are right -- adventure games will never become good novels -- they are also making an irrelevant point, because adventure games are not novels at all. The adventure game is an artistic genre of its own, a unique aesthetic field of possibilities, which must be judged on its own terms. And while the apologists certainly are wrong, in that the games will never be considered good novels, they are right in insisting that the genre may improve and eventually turn out something rich and wonderful. This may or may not happen, so the only way to understand the genre is to study the various works that already exist and how they are played." -- Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext (info)

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