eLandscape of the future- Second lives, take two

So I have already talked about virtual lives such as computer games, but as I enjoy the topic I felt like I could talk about it some more. My favourite part of most video games is that you get to live out a life that is different to your own, often in fantastical ways involving things such as magic or mythical creatures. This is because it allows us to escape from the boring drudgery of our everyday lives and do something both exciting and surreal, even if it is only sub-passively through our computers. In the future, I am more then expecting (anticipating would be the closest word) that there will be many more people playing video games and living out secondary (or even in some cases such as myself, multiple) lives very different to our own. In fact I expect that the number of people who play video games in such a way to double by 2020.
The number of people who play RPG video games (remember RPG stands for Role Playing Game/s) is dependant on the style of the RPG, the availability of it, the requirements of it (ie do you need the newest console, or a computer which is above the norm of the off the line models), and how repetitive it is (this is how World of Warcraft is losing so many of its players between expansions). If the future of gaming hold what I pray it soon will, virtual reality gaming!!!, then these games will soon become more popular due to the levels of interaction between the game, the character, and the player, being reduced and improved to allow for more realistic gaming. It should be noted that we are already well on the way to this as we already have games which we can control through movement, and there are experimental virtual reality sets in use by military groups for training, already.
This form of social media is already becoming a major player in the field, as 90% of generation Y who live in developed countries have access to, or at least have played, a video game in the last year alone. As gaming companies continue to advance to meet the standards set by their target audience, the quality of even the most basic (for the time) video game will improve drastically. If we were to compare the basic video game of this decade, to the one of last, we would be amazed and how far our technology has advanced to achieve such levels, and this is just in terms of gaming not to mention transportation, education, and medical care as some other examples.