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It's not about general social connotations, as it doesn't matter what your average player wants to call them. It's about the language developers use to talk about their products to one another mainly, and about developing a common language to discuss them in. Distinguishing between the two leads to unclear thinking, since it's a false dichotomy. Most "text MUDs" have graphics. All graphical MUDs have text. Meridian 59 has less players than Achaea, and yet people refer to it as an MMORPG, so clearly number of players has little to do with it (and if it did, then Achaea and Aardwolf, for instance, would need to be different creatures from a 25 player DIKU, since the difference in magnitude between those and large text MUDs is actually less than the magnitude between large text MUDs and games commonly referred to as MMORPGs (such as Asheron's Call, the now-dead ACII, etc, not to mention small graphical games like ATitD).
--matt
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