alt Hacker NewsWhat I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one. And then I wanted a way to join MUDs together—like if you leave a forest by a certain path you are, unbeknownst to you, rerouted to a different MUD that picks up where the forest left off.
In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than any that had come before it—where you could really just keep going, keep playing, never see all of it.
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> What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one.
Those are MOOs. They're fully programmable in MOO code. Here's the original MOO: https://lambda.moo.mud.org/
There's no point to a MOO other than to be itself, although LambdaMOO does have an RPG system in it you can play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO
Server resources: https://www.wrog.net/moo/
Programmer's manual: https://www.wrog.net/moo/progman.html
yduJ's venerable duck tutorial: https://jkira.github.io/moo-cows/docs/tutorials/wind-up-duck...
I never got deep into it, but I remember reading magazine articles back in the 90s that that's exactly what the new generation of MUDs were. Wiki has pages on MOO, TinyMUCK, MUSH etc - these are basically platforms where the players themselves can expand out new objects and locations, presumably in a similar way to Second Life or other MMO sandboxes do today.
So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they primarily appeal to a very specific type of gamer, one that doesn't have much overlap with the type of gamer who would like an "endless" open world or the type of gamer who would like a tightly-plotted narrative experience. I think it's more something that appeals to fans of table-top RPGs, people who are looking for a collaborative storytelling environment.
I think many gamers have the imagination of an epic infinite metaverse style game, but then when they actually get the opportunity to participate in one, it turns out that that's not really what they wanted after all, because it requires a level of creative labor that they weren't expecting. This is why I think the market has naturally segmented into sandbox builders, survival/roguelikes, traditional narrative adventures etc.