This is a MUD, which stands for "multiple user dungeon"; what's more useful is that it's based on a form of game called a "text adventure". Once upon a time back in the eighties these were some of the biggest sellers of the game industry! They would present a small world to explore, often a mostly-abandoned one because that's easier to do. You'd wander around, map the world (usually on paper, by hand! [1]), and discover creatures, characters, and items sitting around it, waiting for you to interact with them.

A lot of them were in the form of exploring some kind of dungeon; D&D was popular among nerds, and "what if the computer did all the record-keeping" was a popular thing to explore. Which explains why this is a "multiple-user dungeon" even if nothing in it is described as dank, underground rooms full of monsters and treasures.

Directions are given as compass directions because that's the very first text adventure did ("Colossal Caves"), and nobody ever found anything better - a few games tried forwards/left/right/back but it was very confusing to keep track of which way you were pointing.

In practice a lot of muds really ended up more like chat servers with a sense of place; instead of being in a "channel" with other people, you're in a "room", which might have a "bulletin board" on it for less-ephemeral discussions than the general chatter among players. There might be monsters to fight and puzzles to solve somewhere off in the map but nobody engaged with them. Instead they just hang out and chat, and roleplay.

1: something like this: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52c9d908e4b0e8... - except probably with a lot more erasures and corrections.