4) Personalisation. Perfect Dark includes a feature which allows you to take a picture of your face using the Game Boy pocket camera and then paste it onto your character in the game. It won't be long before PC developers are offering the same kind of feature, and eventually players will be able to completely customise their in-game avatars - changing their clothing, build and appearance before entering the game to give a totally individual look. The possibilities are... well, a bit scary actually.

5) Cross-server gaming. Transparent server traversal is a burgeoning technology that allows gamers to go from a level held on one server to a level held on another, just by walking through a door or portal while in-game. Unreal and Ultima Online are currently utilising this system, and if it catches on it could revolutionise online gaming. By linking several servers in this way, developers would give players a huge amount of space to explore and fight in. And this is just the beginning. VR and Internet research company ZeroKast are currently looking into the possibility of connecting heterogeneous environments: in other words, making it possible for players to seamlessly transport from a Quake World to an Unreal world and back again. Amazing stuff.

6) Sustained worlds. 3DO's Meridian 59, Origin's Ultima Online and 989's EverQuest are all fantasy-based games which exist as ever-present online worlds. Players log-on, explore, talk to other players, fight, gain experience points, and when they leave, the world remains - a true virtual reality. As modem technology improves, and the price of getting online drops (as it is bound to over the next couple of years) the 'persistent world game' market will grow exponetially.

What the dogged popularity of text-based MUDs proves is that gamers love the social element - they love the fact that you can set up clans and roam about the terrain in a huge gang, swap items and quests with other inhabitants or even get married and divorced. But, thankfully, it won't all be Dungeons and Dragons in the future. Russian developers Eagle Dynamics, for example, are currently working on plans to create a persistent online world for users of its own Flanker flight sims. Eventually the team hope to allow anyone with a tank/plane/war sim released by their publisher, Mindscape, to join in huge online battles. Creative Assembly are planning something similar for their feudal Japan RTS Shogun, but details are scant at present.