TriadCity

I'm friends with the writers and I moderate the bbs.

TriadCity uses a MUD like interface to help players find comfort with something familiar. But, it's not a MUD. The writers consider it literary postmodernism, and if you're an academic at Cambridge writing books on that subject, seems you agree.

For example, subjective experience is created by showing different descriptions to different characters. Our characters may see the same thing differently depending on their experiences. This is meant to evoke 20th century literary modernism, for example the cloud in Ulysses, or the Alexandria Quartet.

Examples of the game world: A Tree of Life taken from the Cabballah, which you climb like a tree house. A wicked parody of the same in a different part of the city, containing spiders and broken washing machines. A bot based on Oscar Wilde. Streets named for corrupt policemen. A town square with sixteen forms of public execution, and a tour guide. Characters found in Jarry, Dickens, and Fielding. A satire on meat eating with slaughterhouse workers who dig up human graves in a cemetery and deliver corpses to restaurants packaged as beef. An area where the characters speak pig latin, another written in haiku, and one written backwards.

A female friendly environment, where women players outnumber men.

On the down side, it's hard to learn. It works best with group play, but there's often nobody there but bots. It can be deliberately confusing and it forces you to just deal with that. Although these are promised, it lacks features which will make this all make sense.

That's my sales pitch. Remember that I'm friends with the writers and have been involved with it for 12 years, so I'm biased. But I've wanted to be involved all this time, so that says something.