In “Virtual Liberty: Freedom to Design and Freedom to Play in Virtual Worlds,� Jack M. Balkin predicted that MMORPG technologies will soon be adopted for non-gaming enterprises, leading to a more diverse future for virtual worlds:
As multiplayer game platforms become increasingly powerful and lifelike, they will inevitably be used for more than storytelling and entertainment. In the future, virtual worlds platforms will be adopted for commerce, for education, for professional, military, and vocational training, for medical consultation and psychotherapy, and even for social and economic experimentation to test how social norms develop. Although most virtual worlds today are currently an outgrowth of the gaming industry, they will become much more than that in time.

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