I went to FurryMUCK specifically because I didn't know how to code there. I was staff on every MUSH I set foot on, and that was where I went to not be staff. My blood pressure dropped to almost normal levels after that. :)

I think it boils down to what you do other than playing games. If the only answer is 'eat and sleep', then there could be a problem. I definitely had a problem. I just managed to turn it to my advantage after it had completely ruined all of my plans. I ended up doing something I'm good at, and pays well, but about which I'm not particularly passionate.

Still figuring out the 'what to do with my degree' part. ;) There are so many different subdisciplines in Biology that picking one to pursue a graduate degree in is proving complicated. I've also picked up a mortgage in the meantime, and paying that on a grad student stipend (~22k a year, about a quarter my last salary) is just not possible. I finished the degree while still working my programming job, so I just stayed at that job until the office closed September of last year.

I had wiz-access on about a dozen MUSHes at one point. Drove me nuts. But it gave me enough experience that I was able to call it 'customer service' and 'administration' and get a tech support job. After a year or so of that, I applied for an opening in our R&D department as a buildmaster and got it. Worked on my C and Perl skills there. After some consolidation, I ended up in QA, then lost my job there when they sold the company.

Got a QA job at my next company, where I ended up writing and maintaining our test tools. That office got closed, moved on to my next QA gig at another company. A year there and I requested a transfer into development and got it, and was there for ~4 years before the office closed (there's a trend there :).

Oddly, kinda worked the opposite for me. I spent all my time on MUSHes when I was in college, was academically dismissed, then turned the programming and computer skills I'd taught myself while MUSHing into a career. Not that I'd expect that to work for modern MMOs, since you don't program anything in them really unless you're into modding. I did eventually go back and finish my biology degree, however, and being kicked out was definitely the reality check I needed on getting my priorities straight (though it took a while to figure that out).