I played eve as an undergraduate student, in the holidays. I loved it, particularly when I got to a point when the game paid for itself. I loved the nerdy community, the fact that the people I interacted with on 'ratting' runs in lowsec were, by day, doing cool things like writing Linux kernel code for a living, or mathematically modelling fisheries for the EU. I loved the fact that they had an ODE fluid model of space; that guns had tracking speeds measured in radians per second; and that I could import market data and try to understand it in terms of martingales.

Then, two things happened. One -- it became a job, bordering on an addiction. My corp-mates wanted my mobile number in case our station got sieged. And then, finally, two, we got scammed. Badly. Our CEO basically stole a lot of stuff, and got us all to help carrying it to Jita so he could sell our own equipment and take the cash (long story). That hurt. I knew him -- I thought -- and I just felt stupidly upset that everything we had collaboratively worked on was....gone. I think my inactive character is somewhere without a scanner in wormhole space, and boy, am I pissed.

I now stick to games with stories; games where you can just be the prophesied hero and save the expansive, virtual world you inhibit. It's a lot nicer than being reminded in your escapist, necessary down-time that people, wherever the come from and whatever they do, are people -- and that includes sometimes being an arsehole too