It would be pretty cool, but it would be a lot harder to pull off. At this point the thought of having to be responsible for another server doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me, and preventing users from writing programs that suck up all the CPU cycles is really tricky.
Plus I really want to focus on the storytelling aspects. Especially the end-game scenario (see spoilers/readme.md if curious) would be extremely problematic to implement in multiplayer.
> preventing users from writing programs that suck up all the CPU cycles is really tricky
I like the low level programming / virtual machine approach for this reason. You can provide the player with a machine that is severely limited in speed and size, which makes for a fun challenge and makes it easy to keep things bounded.
Plus I really want to focus on the storytelling aspects. Especially the end-game scenario (see spoilers/readme.md if curious) would be extremely problematic to implement in multiplayer.