The Free Parrots of Telegraph Hill

San Francisco's real life Telegraph Hill has become home ground to a large colony of wild parrots, who've escaped over the years from people's homes, or been set free. For me, seeing them is a moving experience. That there's hope that creatures of all species can be free in their own ways. Sure, anthropomorphizing. So what?

TriadCity's version continues our NorthWestern Third themes of escape, personal and collective re-invention, and exploration of freedom in practice. Our parrots have scarpered from The Aviary in the Southern Third; or the Zoo; or private homes. They've claimed a section of public park as their own, and the public there are happy to tolerate them. Like me, much of that particular public finds them symbolic of their own aspirations.

The narrative here is very minimal. Simply the parrots themselves, up in the trees, doing some parrot things, with a minimal explanation of how they've come to be there. A few sentences. Taken out of context, this doesn't tell readers much. In context, it adds a layer of symbolic resonance to the many examples of human escape, re-invention, and assembly found throughout the Third. I see this as a technical practice appropriate to this medium: narrative via accumulation. Repeat but vary similar tropes, until the repetition forms patterns in readers' minds, becoming an expectation. Then they get it, hopefully consciously, but even unconsciously is really just fine.

Naturally there will be some game players — "killers" in the Bartle typology — who expect these critters to exist as simple sword fodder. They may be in for a surprise. Along with many others in NorthWest, our parrots are solidaristic. Attack one, the others rush to defend, and you'll find yourself battling 24 or 30 quite tough opponents of level 35 who are very rapidly beating the snot out of you. Run away! Learn anything? Well — up to you, that.

Here's a better idea. Bring a picnic, sit in the park, watch the city lights come on after sunset, listen to the parrots in the trees overhead. Climb the trees, be chill, watch them live their parrot lives. Take them as a model.

Not everything in TC is satire.

Satire By Juxataposition

TriadCity's main organizing metaphor is geographical: the three Thirds, with their contrasting and competing cultures. Where literary theorists like to speak metaphorically of "textual spaces", ours is in fact literally spatial. As authors we can play with this. We can use geography to make satire in ways which I think can be pretty entertaining. I suppose we can use it to be dead serious, too, but, you know. Nah.

Think of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Wealth, standing in mirrored symmetry on opposite sides of the River. The TOL is filled with Kabbalah symbols and playing children; the TOW is infested with an army of intelligent killer spiders. Juxtaposed in this way, the satire is certainly unsubtle. Quick quiz for Levi-Straussian Structuralists: what's missing? Exactly, a Tree of Something-or-Other in the South. We have an empty place there where a Tree of Knowledge would go. Will that be filled in one day, or is it intended to remain empty permanently? I'll let you know.

Other mirrors: Pirate Ship / U Boat; Courts / University; meat-as-corruption / vegetables as growth; Gnosticism / Zoroastrianism.

Three statue gardens. NorthWest: children's carvings of historical figures whose examples are meaningful to people striving to invent practical structures of self-governance. They're rebels, leaders of slave revolts: Toussaint L'Ouverture, Spartacus, Jefferson, Marx, Harriet Tubman, Tolstoy, Oscar Romero And they're happy: all smiling, some gleefully, as though the future they imagined were upon them here and now and they're able to participate. The detail of their smiles builds meaning through accumulation. One might be entertaining; when they're all smiling, something's going on. South: holograms of famous philanthropists with open palms: Bill and Melinda Gates, Alfred Nobel, Kylie Minogue, Bono. Yes, I'm trivializing, but, it's satire, yah? Well-intentioned as they may be, their work is anti-empowering, elitist and undemocratic, in direct contrast to the approaches explored in NorthWest NorthEast: living statues, a garden of destitute people paid the U.S. hourly minimum wage to stand stock still for the entertainment of passers-by. Think of those dancing statues of liberty on street corners holding arrows pointing you to tax preparation offices. Or the wicked dark humor of Michael Moore's Roger and Me, where unemployed auto workers take temp jobs as living statues at executive lawn parties.

Visitors to TriadCity won't encounter the meanings of these juxtapositions in one or two visits. They'll have to build a mental map of what and where things are, before this kind of mirroring will become visible. How often does this happen in reality? I dunno. My hope is that TriadCity's details are vibrant and engrossing enough to keep people exploring, and give them faith that there's a big picture to come to understand.

Escape From Underground

I spent an hour tonight on a popular text MUD, just checking it out. 50 players online and a vibrant Web-based community.

Awful.

Underground, dark caves, and you can't move a single room without being attacked by racially-tinged subhumans. Everything I hated about these primitive worlds way back in the 1980s.

I find the racialism especially distressing. Killing an imp or a troll is acceptable because although humanoid they're not really fully human, not as human as the rest of us. And we know where this comes from, or to phrase it more neutrally, if we have a sense of history we know what history this echoes.

Gary and I founded SmartMonsters because we saw potential in the medium to be more than this. Let's not privilege violence as the primary path to experience; let's place the violence we do explore into social contexts which are at least somewhat less mindless; let's write well and recruit people who write really well; let's explore what writerly technical practices make sense in this medium; let's develop rich computer code which enables player subjectivity in ways Modernist fiction couldn't imagine; let's bring the friggin' world out from friggin' underground, ferheavensake.

What if what players really want is simply to Blow Crap Up?

Or is this all that they know exists?

Zaroff Park

A new Zone in progress, Zaroff Park, begins as a simple hack-and-slash opportunity for Blowing Crap Up. Go there, kill bad guys, or good guys depending. Take out your shitty day on game critters rather than your real life landlady. Like the Spider Forest, Zaroff Park is intended to present compelling challenges to lone players, unlike say the Tree of Wealth which emphatically requires groups.

The thematics are more interesting than this bald description may suggest. The NPCs available for destruction are condemned slaves. They're too old to work, or they've behaved rebelliously, or displeased their masters for some other reason. Their masters have sent them to Zaroff Park, where they'll be hunted for sport Most Dangerous Game-style by big-game types bored with tigers. Players who want to kill things are welcome.

And so are NPCs who want to kill things. Warriors looking for practice; Bounty Hunters honing their skills; bored nannies looking for diversion: NPCs from all over the game world will come here to hunt and kill other NPCs.

So that, if you're a Liberator, say, or some other NorthWestern anti-slavery do-gooder, you may want to go there to prevent the hunters from succeeding. Choose the method that suits you.

Equally, NPCs who are Liberators or etc. may go there for similar purposes.

Meaning we've got NPCs hunting NPCs who are hunting NPCs, and of course there'll be yet other NPCs who'll be interested in hunting those hunting NPCs, and you'll see how this all gets pretty convoluted pretty quick.

Fun, huh?

Zaroff Park is part of a larger complex of blood sports arenas in the neighborhood surrounding the Circus Maximus, NorthEastern Third, natch. It's online now if you want to check it out. Hunter and hunted NPCs will be undergoing refinement for a few days yet. Watch the MOTD for the formals.

Reinvention in Merchant City

TriadCity's Merchant City neighborhood is about reinvention.

The people are transforming the public space they've inherited, or maybe it would be better to say confiscated, from history. Once a Victorian enclave of brownstones and pocket parks, where nannies and prams and public monuments to empire and order all spoke unsubtly of prosperity and self-satisfaction and dominance and trade, the neighborhood increasingly resembles The People's Republic of Berkeley, as theater collectives and punk hair stylists and hip entrepreneurs slowly morph the shops and monuments and squares into public resources resembling themselves: good-humored, egalitarian, decidedly communal.

They're transforming themselves at the same time. Everyone's a runaway. Convicts, divorcees, abused children: forging new lives as waiters or hair cutters or shop clerks, living inexpensively in nearby St. Andrew's Scone or the collective homes around the corner, bringing their kids with them into new futures. Many are borrowed characters. I'll cite Rayette Dipesto as one favorite. Freed from abusive beau Bobby Dupea she's returned to waitressing, now in an entirely new context she can at least partially control. Or another waitress, Carol Connelly, able to live independently in NorthWest where her sickly child's medical expenses will be taken care of by the community.

These dynamics aren't narrated so much as depicted. In a novel, the motives and prior histories of these characters would be spoken out loud, probably at length. Here, they're sketched in a line or two, and the characters are shown going about their days. The nature of this medium is less about telling, more about showing. Narration accumulates through interaction, repetition, juxtaposition. By assembling these "flat" characters in a concentrated space I can show you their broad commonalities. Narration is not the precondition but rather the outcome of these technical practices.

Merchant City is my new favorite place in TriadCity. Nobody's getting killed there, there are no adventures happening, nothing epic unfolding. Except, there is. It's just on a far more gradual, more individual, and at the same time more collective scale than we're used to. The people there are exploring the practical meanings of "democracy". They rule — they really do. Now what? How to build a thoroughly egalitarian society profoundly controlled by the people themselves? Experimentation is in order: let's try things and see what happens. This is very precisely what Marx meant by the term "socialism". I like it there a ton.