Aleita Taviah
Aes Sedai
Welcome back! Please let us know if you need anything
Its like... an MMO before graphics became a thing. Its like having a character in a book, and every other character is the book has a different writer. You can give your character as much or as little personality as your imagination can handle, depending on how you write them. Then set them free on a world full of monsters (or whatever evil the particular game has) and other players who you can be aligned with or against depending on the role you have or alliances you form.
Many people create characters in these worlds that develop with other people's characters over many years. The lack of graphics can be seen as a negative or incredibly freeing because the world is limited only by what people can create via text.
(Can you tell I loved it?)
There are still some active MUDs out there but I personally had to stop as it was far to addictive but also the one I was on grew very toxic.
Edit to add that MUD is the acronym for multi user domain