A Possible Future - What will be the state of Gaming & Virtual Environments in years to come?

I was pondering the changes in the video games I have played over the years, from the home console version of Pong my father brought home which I thought was SO cool, shooting asteriods and hyperspacing....being Luigi at one friends house and beating up my other friends on Mortal Kombat with the oh so naughty blood feature turned on... Sonic the Hedgehog which I described as like being "in an interactive movie" when my Dad asked me what was so great about it after catching me sneaking downstairs to play at 5am one morning...and wandering around with a bunch Cys and later alien avatars in AlphaWorld then ActiveWorlds....
And I must not leave out the chunk of hours of my life I spent devoted to being a Matriarch Sorceress in Diablo nor the countless evenings I spent shooting zombies and outsmarting the evil Umbrella corporation...
So many interesting experiences to reflect upon now that I am a little older (and I like to think wiser) and am reading about and participating in game research.

These days the suped up PS2 with it's HDD I bought Final Fantasy just to get a hold of and it's extra memory cards and vibrating controller sits idle when not working on my Resident Evil Outbreak research project and has even ~gasp~ gathered a layer of dust a few times now!
I am living a Second Life and loving it. Not only am I exploring Second Life with my own personal account, as I blogged about recently, I have an avatar/acct for my Virtual Research Assistant job with the Masters of Digital Media Program at GNWC, working on a virtual locale for their Centre for Digital Media.

Looking back on these experiences and the many others I've had, some of which I may share another time, I imagine the possible future of my gaming, and indeed as the Wii and PS3 are released, and virtual environments are increasingly used in education and training, the future of gaming (and VR) for all of us.

I imagine perhaps in future histories of gaming, that in the early 2000's gamers gradually drifted from their consoles to virtual environments, where their avatar and experiences could be highly customized and changed from day to day....
At the same time, audiences who had never played a video game in their life took up the games this group had largely left behind, the Yahoo Literati, the Solitaire, the Console games.
Even further in the future, perhaps this group then joins the others, in a virtual world or worlds that would make ActiveWorlds and Second Life look entirely primitive, but a definite ancestor.
A place or series of places where websites are no longer pages, where groups have highly complex virtual communities that are disconnected from "rl" as well as groups that are entirely blurred between them. Places where fantasy WoW type scenarios take place, shooter environments, educational environments, virtual music scenes and performing arts venues, environments we haven't even dreamed of yet, an experience that can be what we traditionally think of as gaming as well as whatever we may dream of experiencing together...a place where we both play and work and where we all contribute to what is around us and what experience, and can be whomever we want to be...