Games are one of the only pursuits that actually allow you to experience that you've accomplished something, and in fact they're all designed to do so, and it's

Games are one of the only pursuits that actually allow you to experience that you've accomplished something, and in fact they're all designed to do so, and it's neatly packaged in such a way that you can be certain it's possible for you to experience at least a set sequence of accomplishments. Couple that with complete abstraction from "the real world" and they are capable of producing the type of persona that is immune to accusations of uselessness / slacking, the person in question constantly gets their "I did stuff" buttons pushed by their in game accomplishments, despite accomplishing very little in the real world. The only other pursuit where this springs to mind is sport, and sport has been around long enough that culture has adjusted to it, and in some cases actually translates sporting achievements into real life achievements. South Korea is already taking this tack to a degree with video games, and with professional gaming leagues, etc, you can see it's probably the way that the pursuit will develop / integrate with mainstream culture eventually. Speaking for myself, I've been absorbed in games at times, the degree to which this absorption is expressed is inversely proportional to my satisfaction with the real world at any given time. I think culture proper doesn't like the idea that "gamers" may be a group mostly capable of not caring what culture thinks about them.