I happen to be a complete Charles Stross fanboy so your mileage may vary on this one, but his speech at LOGIN 2009 on the state of gaming in 2030 is Stross at his best in extrapolating current trends to the near future.
Much of what Stross talks about is already starting to happen — the smartphone is starting to become ubiquitous as it becomes more powerful and has access to faster and faster bandwidth. Stross envisions a future where this leads to augmented reality so we no longer play games so much as we are constantly surrounded by the Internet and games everywhere we go.
For example: if you point your phone at a shop front tagged with an equivalent location in the information space, you can squint at it through the phone’s screen and see … whatever the cyberspace equivalent of the shop is. If the person you’re pointing it at is another player in a live-action game you’re in (that is: if their phone is logged in at the same time, so the game server knows you’re both in proximity), you’ll see their avatar. And so on.
Using these gizmos, we won’t need to spend all our time pounding keys and clicking mice inside our web browsers. Instead, we’re going to end up with the internet smearing itself all over the world around us, visible at first in glimpses through enchanted windows, and then possibly through glasses, or contact lenses, with embedded projection displays.
God, I want to live in that world. Except once we get there, as Edward Castronova has argued, how do we make the “real world” compelling enough to get people to stick around and do the not-so-fun things that keep civilization going?