Good points you raise, and I share your curiosity about what comes next.

I remember the 80's, sitting behind the keyboard of my Texas Instruments "toy", hooked up to a TV screen - thumbing through a 600-page manual (in a 3-ring binder) typing furiously in BASIC for hours, just to make the TV screen switch from blue, to red, to black, to yellow, and back to blue. And being fascinated. (I know: I am easily amused).

The bottom line was: I was trying to assert some control over what was displayed on that cathode-ray tube.

PC gaming is that. Maybe all gaming is that:

-some percentage of skill, mixed with
-some percentage of chance, to produce
-some degree of spectacle, that I can control

The last 10 years have seen an increased emphasis on the "spectacle" bit, with arguments among players about the 'right' blend of percentages of skill and chance that seems right to them.

With the further deployment of PCs throughout the world, and the proliferation of broadband connection speeds undreamt-of just 10 years ago, I think we'll see fewer and fewer stand-alone off-the-shelf games, and more of the WoW model: huge games had for a tiny (financially acceptable) weekly or monthly subscription fee. People/players decry that now, because we're used to "owning" our games. But we don't really. We just own the little plastic disc they come on, and the hardware needed to make the 1's and 0's on the disc mean something.

Random thoughts of an old gamer.