In a few places, it already is.
Avery, a 10-year-old in New York City, occasionally plays Pokemon cards through video conferencing with a friend in Australia, who he's never met except on the internet. His online buddy is the son of one of his mom's best friends.
"I don't think either of them thought that the video thing was all that strange," said Avery's mother, Nancy Friedman, who recently blogged about her son's video playdates. "He really truly refers to him as 'my friend.'"
Avery, who loves Pokemon cards about as much as anything, said he has nearly as much fun playing the game -- making up rules along the way -- through a video camera as he does on the playground at school recess.
"The intensity [of the game] at recess is a little bigger because you have a short amount of time. We have recess periods that are pretty short," he said. "But it's fun online. Since they're not actually seeing you, you can switch Pokemon cards easier. And there are really open rules to it. But I think it's about even."
Other kids are just happy to chat with each other over video.
Carrington McDowell-Walsh, an 11-year-old who lives in Los Angeles, California, said she goes on Skype to gossip while she's browsing the internet.
But she doesn't Skype with friends she sees daily.
"The people I Skype with, normally I don't see them at all anymore. So it's really nice to see them there. I would prefer to 'see them' see them," she said, "but I don't otherwise."
Laurie Zelinger, a Ph.D. child psychologist, said video playdates offer a good alternative to real-world play if a kid is sick, or doesn't have friends in the neighborhood. But she cautioned against parents thinking of it as a replacement for face-to-face playdates, which are more valuable for kids, she said.
"It's better than texting and some of the other, more remote kinds of contact," she said. "However, I don't think it's a good substitute for in-person play opportunities."
She added that kids today are increasingly stripped of face-to-face play time because they have busy schedules, because they live far away from friends and because saftey reasons prevent them from playing outside as much.
Riggs, the mother of the 2-year-old who Skypes, said she'd like to use video chats to expose her daughter to the world outside North Carolina.
She recently posted on a Skype message board that she wants her daughter Ella to start having playdates with a 2-year-old in another country.
"She's got plenty of friends here. She has a little playgroup. But I was kind of looking for someone maybe in another country that had a little boy or girl her age that could maybe talk to her on Skype," Riggs said.
She sees it as "just kind of a way to get her introduced to other cultures and other languages at an early age."
So far, no one was written back. But Riggs is holding out hope.
She hopes video chats will broaden her toddler's world.
