It's not a game and there are no characters. It's just you participating in a virtual social context with a bunch of other people. If the Mudcat was in real time, and it had visual animated avatars that could be controlled by their users, and the users could build elements of the virtual context themselves, it would be essentially the same thing as Second Life.

My avatar has a name in the same way that I have a user name here in the Mudcat. It doesn't cost anything to use the platform, but you can spend money in there for all kinds of things. And you can pay a fee for a more spiffy version of the platform if you want, but it's not necessary.