[nvarsj]

MUDs are great, and I think the gameplay of the best ones is still untouched by modern MMORPGs. Implementing new features, scripting new interactions, and so on takes much less work after all, being text based. You also have incredibly rich text descriptions, and the lore can get very deep as a result. Many hours of my youth were spent playing and hacking on various MUDs. I added MCCP to CircleMUD for example, and honed most of my C skills on MUD code bases.

[dbish]

I think there's a game type somewhere between today's MMORPGs and MUDs that can bring some of these features and text based interactions to an MMO. For example, I started prototyping a game a last year that was old school cyberpunk-ish style where you had a console that you can interact with a internet-like network, and this console let you do a lot of the mud-like text interactions and automation, but there was also a part of the game to visualize and let you interact with the network without the console.

[MrLeap]

I've been making a thing called Tentacle Typer for the last 6~ months I'm hoping it'll be a basis for something like you're describing eventually. I've created lots of systems that can enable it. Prolific content creation is the largest mountain to climb as an indie solo :)

Right now it's very single player.

https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1366083915946094596