= What's a MOSS?
Good question. It stands for **Multi-user Object-oriented Shared Sandbox**. But what is it?

== Two family trees
Multi-user text games split early into two branches that barely touched for years.

**The combat lineage:** MUD1 --> AberMUD --> **DikuMUD** / **LPMud**. Goal-driven RPG worlds: levels, monsters, combat, loot, areas. Here the world is built offline: DikuMUD loads area files written outside the game; on LPMud, wizards write code in their own directories. There's no in-game way to carve out a new room. This is what most people mean when they say "a MUD."

**The social / creative lineage:** **TinyMUD** --> **MUSH**, **MUCK**, **MOO**. Built around presence, conversation, and -- the radical part -- building the world live while it runs.

If the signature of the MUD is the fantasy setting, combat, level advancement and sense of adventure/heroism, then the signature of the second kind is the **dig** command.

== Where DIG comes from
The **dig** command was introduced by **TinyMUD** (Jim Aspnes, 1989).

It carried a genuinely new idea: a player, standing inside the running world, types a word and a new room springs into being; already wired to where they're standing. Building stopped being a chore done by staff with the server offline, and became something you do live, in play. Everything in the MUSH/MUCK/MOO family inherits it.

**dig** was adopoted by every kind of world-building MUD after TinyMUD. I didn't know that when I wrote it, and I have never actually played a MUCK, MUSH or MOO before -- but, it makes a lot of sense as a command name, doesn't it? It's the defining gesture of an entire branch of the family; and the branch MOSS belongs to, technically. But I think you will find our dig command quite special compared to others.

== MUSH vs MUCK vs MOO
Within that branch, building is common to all three. What actually separates them is the in-world programming language: whether, and how, ordinary users write //behaviour// into the world:

  * **MUSH** (PennMUSH, TinyMUX): "softcode": attributes plus a text-rewriting language, with flags and locks. Heavily role-play oriented.
  * **MUCK** (FuzzBall): **MUF**, a Forth-like language living on objects.
  * **MOO** (LambdaMOO, 1990): fully object-oriented: every //thing// is an object with **properties** and **verbs**, inheriting from parent objects, and players program the world live. The "OO" is the whole point.

== So where does MOSS sit?
My experience is with the classic MUD. JediMUD. CircleMUD. Medievia. But my idea has a lot in common with the MUCK/MUSH/MOO.

MOSS can **dig** rooms and shape zones live (see [[How to Build]]) just like a TinyMUD. But we don't have an in-world programming language, and the spirit of the world will become remarkably Diku (that's just how I envision a MUD).

That combination of TinyMUD's live, in-world building bolted onto Diku's structured areas, and combat/character development is unusual, and arguably the most interesting thing about a MOSS.

A few MOSS paradigms won't find in the classics:

* **Draft / commit:** a dug room starts as a draft you can walk around in, and becomes permanent only when you **commit** it. A staging step the old systems never had.
* **A browser, not telnet:** you play MOSS over the web, not a 1990s terminal.

== The road ahead
The name promises "Object-oriented," and that part is still ahead of us. Today there are rooms and zones, but no //objects,// nothing to pick up, no items with behaviour. The next step is objects and inventories; the step after that, if MOSS ever wants to lean towards a true MOO, is **verbs on objects**: a small in-world language so builders can give the world behaviour, not just shape. I think that is far off, but I do have some ideas on how to do it. Honestly though? Never played a MOO.

== So... what's a MOSS?
It's the thing you just read about: a world you build from the inside, arranged into areas, with combat and character development, played in your browser, slowly in size and scope -- a bit like moss. In some ways it's an unfair question. MUD, MUCK, MUSH, MOO -- each defined itself by what it did, how people experienced it.

So, what's a moss? Go to [[How to Play]] and explore! Because as Ensign Harry Kim once said, //"When I think about everything we've been through together, maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey, and if that journey takes a little longer, so we can do something we all believe in, I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with."//