codebase
MOO
Object-oriented, edited entirely from inside, and as much a research and teaching platform as a game engine.
Games running it
We have not identified any yet. That is a fact about what this crawler has measured, not about what exists — a game we have not reached, or whose codebase we could not read, is not counted here.
MOO — MUD, Object-Oriented — takes the "the world edits itself" idea further than anything else in the hobby. LambdaMOO, the original server, ships a small C core and a database; essentially everything a user experiences is written in the MOO language, inside the running database, by the people using it. There is no source file for a room.
That property gave MOOs a life outside games. Through the nineties they were used for teaching, conferencing and research — Diversity University, BioMOO, Jay's House — and the technical literature about MOO is disproportionately academic for a codebase in this space.
Deployment today is small but genuinely non-zero, and the servers that remain have often been running continuously for decades.
What it looks like from outside
No MSSP, and no WHO we could parse on the game we measured. What it did have was a sentence in
its connect screen reading "one of three players are active" — which is where the spelled-out
number reader in this crawler comes from. A digits-only parser sees no count there at all, and
would have reported that game as unknown for ever.
See also
- MUSH, MUD, MUCK, MOO — what the words mean Four words for four traditions, none of which is a genre. What they actually tell you.
- MUCK A TinyMUD descendant with its own Forth-like in-game language, and a social culture distinct from the MUSH side.