MOOs, like MUSHes, were much more social spaces than games, though some of them had games built on top of them (e.g. LambdaMOO’s RPG). Unlike other systems, MOO

MOOs, like MUSHes, were much more social spaces than games, though some of them had games built on top of them (e.g. LambdaMOO’s RPG). Unlike other systems, MOO was built on a remarkably powerful, multi-user runtime with its own programming language and object database. What really made it special was that it exposed that programming language to its users, encouraging them to build wild and amazing new objects and interactions in a text-based virtual world. To program MOO, you didn’t need wizard/admin powers, you just needed Programner permissions, which were much easier to come by. Just follow a tutorial to get started (such as yduJ’s ever popular Wind-Up Duck) https://lelandra.com/joan/moocode.htm https://lelandra.com/joan/moocode.htm The object runtime had some basic permissions around both ownership and types of interactions. They weren’t great, and a determined attacker could usually take the system down if they wanted, but they were enough to prevent most basic (and more importantly, accidental) kinds of mischief. When you give the users of a social space the tools to build and play and extend the world, amazing things happen. With enough users, six ridiculously imaginative things happen before breakfast. There were games, bulletin boards, puppets, creatures, vehicles, and those are just the basics. I remember an IRC client that appeared as a pair of headphones: don them, you’re in a channel. The wonder of what I'd seen stuck with me for many years afterwards. I ended up working at Linden Lab, the home of Second Life, because of it. SL, while amazing in many ways, was nowhere near as simple and fun as MOO. If you want (say) a goldfish-powered helicopter to crash into your room and transport you away, Second Life demands hours of modeling, coding, and animation. In MOO, a text-based world, you just type an emote. The MOO programming environment made it wonderfully easy to glue verbs (i.e. object methods) to existing objects. I didn’t do much with it myself, but I did take a “throw” verb from a snowball, which could be thrown at anyone across the MOO, and attach it to a Creature, resulting in Fluff the Throwable Sheep. Others did far more interesting things; I’ll never forget Tabitha the Living Room, who reacted to things being said and done by the players sitting in her. In 1993, LambdaMOO showed me what the internet would bring. While the World Wide Web took the concept of a shared, user-programmable social system a billion times further than MOO could ever dream of, I've never seen anything else demonstrate the idea as simply, consistently, and playfully.