[the_logos]

I'm not sure what you mean by the book vs. movie comparison. Books are not inherently better than movies or vice-versa, nor are they exploring the same space. Film is better at some things than books and books are better at some things than film. It's an apples and oranges comparison, much more so than text vs. graphical MUDs which are, fundamentally, the same thing just with a different front-end (whereas books and movies are fundamentally different mediums).

As far as text vs. graphical MUDs go, I would have agreed with you 5 years ago. Now, I'm not so sure. Few text MUDs attempt anything that is anything but a re-tread of what's already been done, while some graphical MUDs are pushing boundaries by opening up to new demographics (Club Penguin), taking advantage of the scale of playerbases in a way no text MUD has ever had the opportunity to (Eve Online), tying together real-world and virtual-worlds in ways no text MUD ever did (Second Life, Entropia Universe), and so on. When people talk about advances in text MUDs though, I mainly just hear the same concepts being thrown about that were a decade ago.

I'm not trying to bash on text MUDs (obviously!) but I just don't see too many people actually trying to make more than the tiniest of incremental leaps forward in text MUDs these days.

--matt