There's no real way of knowing what people will do when they find themselves in a position of responsibility. Of those of us here who will go on to positions of responsibility in the gaming industry and indeed the world, some will rise to the challenge, some won't.
On the gaming front, I'll say this: we're going to have a huge amount of technology on our hands that our previous gen counterparts could only dream of. Whether we use this technology welll or not is completely in the hands of others. If done right, games will be available to everyone and of a far higher quality experience than could have been thought possible. I reckon that gaming will have a very bright future once this generation grows up, not because of the new people, but because of the sheer technological resources available for this kind of thing. Gaming will be cheaper, it will look nicer, and the gaming worlds will be bigger, faster, and more interactive than ever before, if the previous four hundred years is anything to go by. Gaming may even help students to learn history. Imagine if you could literally revisit the ancient world, completely recreated down to the button from the historical record. Literally visit ancient Rome. Or Sparta. Gaming could also help doctors or surgeons in training. Beyond educational uses, gaming will also just be a lot more fun, as well as potentially a lot more immersive.
Am I being too optimistic? As games get more and more realistic, they may come under fire. At the moment gaming combat and real fighting have about as much in common as lamb chops and cyanide pills. They're both ingestible, organic substances. One of them tastes nice, though they probably aren't too good for you if you eat them non-stop, but that goes for everything. The other one will kill you, painfully. So except for the idiots in the media, no one can seriously say that game violence causes real violence.
Now lets consider the future, say, if VR comes online, or even if gaming just leaps the uncanny valley and becomes hyper-realistic, and the Wii's motion technology really catches on and becomes not just widespread, but actually lifelike. Suddenly, you can be using a control model with similar characteristics to a real gun or sword, in world that looks and in the case of VR may even feel as real as this one. Now suddenly the argument that gaming violence and real violence are in two different worlds from each other is called into question. On the other hand, such technology could be very valuable for the military, helping to save soldiers and civilians lives on the battlefield with advanced, lifelike, metal-gear-esque VR training. Medics and surgeons may be able to train on life-like virtual patients, saving lives from rookie mistakes. So while arguments could be advanced that this realism is a terrible thing, there will always be an argument that really, it could be a very valuable thing as well. Also, and this is where the experience of the up-and-coming generation of gamers does come in, we have been through the torrent of abuse thrown at our medium and will remember that, and gaming has become a lot more mainstream. So the proponents of gaming will be a lot more vocal in the future.
Thats my two cents. (or two pounds, that turned out to be a rather long post.)
