I guess I can sympathize a lot with MadMilitia... My 'real job' requires a lot of, eh, thought, since it's R&D focused. Small defense contractor, though, so I get to wear about 5 different hats at a time. Owning your own home is awesome, but it's also kind of an endless project.

I still like my games relatively complex, but they aren't terribly fulfilling anymore. They are more of a distraction, roughly equivalent to a good movie, or a good book. No, wait, that's probably a self-lie, since my favorite games of late have been incredibly complex 'grand strategy' games, lol. I'm also a dwarf fortress player, though I'm staying away from it for now, somewhat deliberately. So its not that games aren't complex...they are just complex in a different way. That's a bit off subject tho, since we are talking about MMO's. We [boxers] tend to take a simple MMO and make it roughly 5x-6x more complex. It's just what we do. Generally MMO's aren't really about complexity though, but about reward cycles. Thus levels, tiered and gated content, and gear resets. Gotta keep the treadmill moving somewhere. And that's ok, really.

Really tho, for me a large component of the experience was always escapism. And I'm aware of that, and cool with that. But not all of it, eh.