The end of the WORD as we know it

Found this game at random through the creator's blog. It's fascinating because it's in all appearances a Twine game, but it's also a chatroom/tiny MUD. In other words, if you're playing this game and you have an internet connection, you can talk to other people in the same room as you, and they can talk back.

There was no one there when I checked it out, presumably because it's been five years and everyone's forgotten about it now. It's a shame, since some features seem to require you to talk to other people to experience them in full, like the "language virus" stuff. I believe different objects can "infect" you with different language viruses when you interact with them, which briefly changes how your chat messages look in a fun way. But there was no one else around for me to talk to.

The creator runs an art gallery in Pittsburgh, which this game is a text-based recreation of. The game was created during COVID as one of the gallery's monthly exhibitions, which couldn't be hosted in person owing to the whole worldwide pandemic business.

The game doesn't contain much "game" stuff; there are no puzzles or anything. It's basically what it says on the tin: a recreation of the real-life gallery, with links to some other interactive fiction games as exhibits of sorts. I'd played most of the games that were linked to, but there were three I hadn't seen before. Two of them, Nested by Orteil and Administer Naloxone by Gollydrat, I checked out and enjoyed. There was also a longer one, Human Errors by Kathrine Morayati, which I haven't looked at yet.

I like it mainly for the multiplayer aspect. As a bonus, the game is open-source and the source code is openly available and easily moddable. Networked multiplayer is really complex and I want to dig into the code a bit to see how the creator did it. Extra stars for the cozy experience and the sheer impressiveness of turning a Twine game into a server-based multiplayer chatroom. It reminded me somewhat of ifMUD.