What's the minimal core of something like a MOO, but using an entity-component system? You need to handle incoming telnet connections, do some kind of parsing on those connections, have a player object, and have a room object. You need some way to define new verbs, to identify objects in commands, to produce descriptions of rooms and their contents, and to create new rooms, doors, and other entities. And you need some kind of scheduling system for future scheduled events. You need to be able to checkpoint the world to disk and to load such a checkpoint at startup.
Components decompose attributes of entities along hypothetically orthogonal dimensions, like location, description, door connectivity, and so on.
It's not immediately apparent that there's a best way to resolve verbs with multiple possible definitions. Maybe the best way is to associate methods with components, and when a verb is invoked on an object with multiple components, activate all the methods. For example, rooms might belong to the description component, but also the room component, and when you describe a room, it should also list its contents' names. But I guess that needs to come in a well-defined sequence.
But maybe I'm overcomplicating things at first, and I could just make
objects be dicts or something. Or an edge-labeled graph.