Games only have value if you have emotional investiture in them. I have no investiture in Stack Overflow points at all, but I do like seeing my karma go up in H

Games only have value if you have emotional investiture in them. I have no investiture in Stack Overflow points at all, but I do like seeing my karma go up in HN (cue epic downvoting now) as I get some sense that I can hang with the cool kids. People see World of Warcraft and say "it's just a bar going up", which is entirely true, but with investiture of that bar (say, for comparison, or sense of progress/reward etc etc) it becomes something else entirely.