Behind the Curtain: Looking to the future

I was reading an article on the BBC News Technology pages the other day, and it piqued my curiosity.

The availability of super-fast broadband is about the only thing that's likely to entice me to move back to my home town.

But how much bandwidth do you need to kill ten more foozles?

Ofcom , the organisation which – among other responsibilities – monitors ISP in the UK, recently reported that the average home broadband speed here is 3.6Mbps. A quick Google search suggests that speeds in the US are similar.

Broadband speeds are climbing, there's no doubt about that, but upload speeds still lag behind download speeds. I imagine that this is one reason preventing developers from getting really experimental with interactivity in MMOs. If your players' bandwidth is being taken up just shunting the basic game data back and forth, why bother eating up the rest of it with something that might just end up being window dressing?

If we're supposed to be living in the age of 'Web 2.0', what things can we expect to see from MMOs when Web 3.0 finally gets here? What kind of innovation or development do you want to see as broadband speeds climb ever higher and social networking becomes even more integrated into our lives than it already is?

Blizzard, for example, are making it easier and easier to keep track of your friends and guildies' Achievements and progress in World of Warcraft with the Armory. What if we saw things going further? There have been rumours about mobile applications for WoW for quite some time now, without anything concrete really showing up. I like to think that it's only a matter of time before we see something come out though, and that it's just a matter of technology lagging behind ideas.

I find the music system in Lord of the Rings Online very interesting. Not because I'm musically gifted – far from it – but because of the way it allow players to create their own content in a mainstream MMO. LotRO isn't a virtual-world, nor is it a simulation game, it's a proper, mainstream MMO following the standard rules and tropes of the genre, but here the developers have given users the ability to insert something of their own into the game world.

Will the ever-increasing processor speeds and frame rates eventually give way to photo-quality graphics and proper virtual worlds? Or will the Uncanny Valley still be around to plague us umpteen hardware and software iterations down the line?

You never know, maybe we'll eventually see a time where technology advances to the stage where virtual learning will become more palatable to those who control the purse strings.