There's something fundamentally satisfying to the human psyche about understanding a set of rules and optimizing actions against them. I think it hits that 'feeling smarter than something' nerve.
We've probably lost some potentially fantastic physicists to MMOs.
This is the hard part about "value creation." Is something that makes someone happier--even if others see that same thing as pointless waste--value?
We don't all want the same things and people want things we don't want, but this also allows us to trade and have both parties come out ahead from their own perspectives.
So there's always a tension between whether people should even be allowed to want some things or they should be forbidden due to being bad or wasteful in some capacity.
But I do think there's a special kind of irony to be complaining about the BS of someone getting money for moving bits and pixels around in a blog post on the internet frequented by a bunch of people, many of whom move bits and pixels around for a living.
Fishing in Final Fantasy XIV is boring yet strangely relaxing, and in many cases doesn't even require looking at the screen.