so i'd love an open discussion about something that i don't have much vocabulary for, if only because there are so few examples of it on the world wide web. anyone/everyone is welcome to chime in.
back in the mid/late 90s there were some attempts at turning web forums and chat interfaces into virtual worlds. beyond all of the 3d chat rooms and telnet muds, there were some 2d graphical sites like moo.ca. The Canada SchoolNet moo was a mud/moo that allowed users to add/remove/modify rooms in real time, in-browser.
snapshot archived here - click 'Web Walkthrough' to walk around:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010417181313/http://www.moo.ca/home
Furcadia went a hundred steps further and integrated a 2d tile-based world with a world editor *and* script editor, so you could build your own "dreams" (multiplayer instances) within the shared game world. the entire game was built around socialization.
both of the above games are not just fancy web chat terminals. building and decorating the game world is a critical part of the social experience. you create a dining room, put chairs in it, program the chairs to allow players to use the 'sit' command, and then invite people into your dining room for a make-believe dinner party.
we now have reddit and various web forums. they're effectively the same threaded conversation that has been around since the usenet days.
what i *don't* see anymore are graphical WWW virtual worlds built around socialization. we either lock down everything and only allow chat. are there web-based MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs that allow for both world building *and* conversation?
one project that comes to mind is @raphkoster's criminally underappreciated Metaplace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace
it was a little like being able to build your own 2d graphical MOO/MUD, but strongly bent towards the web. it had a scripting language and a flash-based graphical editor. i wish there was more info out there about it.