This is a nice presentation from Jesse Schell (ex-disney visioneer), who is talking about the future of virtual characters. He has some really interesting but also kinda scary visions of the future.

You guys should watch it, it's quite interesting (and entertaining):
(Please skip to 5:10 for it to start)

Unity Key Notes - The future of virtual characters

Great find! Thank you!
I don't think that it is more scaring than 'everybody has a dog, but no one to speak with'.
Games already help and mislead, as movies or books did and do.
The avatar 'mechanic' works, because our brain already thinks in this way, our brain uses 'avatars' to handle our personal and social relations - our image of ourself is sort of an avatar which is build from the role model of our parents.
Although, I didn't expect that a game character actually could be such an elementary part of our life later on in the future.
But, there are quite nice possibilities. I could feed the AI of my Avatar with the philosophical knowledge or strategies of a targeted career of myself to push myself in a direction that I want to achieve. The avatar could became a sort of coach, f.i. asking me whether I wear a fresh shirt when leaving the house to participate in a meeting... and so on.

EDIT: Maybe, it is a bit scary, but then the society has to control whether an avatar is good or not.

But i can see a lot of abuse in that system too, for collecting data and even your personal emotions, secrets, etc.

And i mean what if someone is getting too addictive to that virtual person. If there is someone who has no friends in real life cause he is hard to get along with or something, and he/she finds that this avatar is superior to his/her real life contacts, he or she might completely get sealed off the society. I don't know if it's a good thing, if a virtual friend is better than having no friend.

A dog is a bit different, a dog might not be able to talk to you, but they do react to your feelings and you can actually "touch" them, which is quite important for contact.

From a gamers perspective, i don't know if i will like this personalized stuff either. If i really start a new mario game and he is greeting me and stuff, it somehow looses it's nostalgic, doesn't it? I mean who doesn't know "It's'a me, maario!" as gamer.
And how can the same character fit into different genres? Which leads me to a more game designer perspective, do i really want a "global" character to be my protagonist?

I don't think they can change their habbit/character (psychologic) for everry game, that would make them non-believeable. They need to have a specific character, that fits yours, so you can become friends. But this same character can't play in a NBA game AND in a God of War, or Zelda game. It wouldn't fit. What about fictional chars like Kirby, Sonic, etc.
And i wouldn't want to design my games to have this universal character in it, i want to have a unique character.

So yeah, we will see. It might be possible one day that we have a global save file for a lot of games, but dunno if that is going to replace our old/normal games.

I don't think there will be more addiction and abuse as we already have. Look at the addicted people of World of Warcraft, look at the abused people of Scientology...
BTW, to have no social contacts is (almost?) always bad.

You don't have to use only one avatar all the time, and you won't. You probably will have a collection of characters, and you will eventually change them while you change your interests and focus onto other things in life or games.

For a developer its more the other way round, if your game has been successful and you build a follow up, you will use the same character, but you will, instead of asking again for the players preferences, load them from a given database of the former game to welcome the player.

Mass Effect 2 does this, loading character and choices made in ME1 into ME2, affecting the plot.