This is a great insight. Social media is just World of Warcraft but less fun. Blue check marks signify elite guild membership, and follower counts are your gear score.
The only difference nowadays is how deadly serious everyone takes these metrics. It is absurd.
Funnily enough, MMORPGs represent the start of gamified work (before we even called it that) back-contaminating videogames.
Remember how in the early days of WoW, people complained about how MMORPGs were more like work you paid to do? MMOs have organic social structures such as guilds where it's members are required to play at specific times in groups and do specific jobs to guarantee success at getting loot drops in an entirely artificial, centrally-planned economy. And then you had games like EVE Online or Entropia, which were entirely designed around being a second job you paid to play.
At some point, this was contained to games which were trying to provide a living world to play in. And the most approachable MMOs (again, like WoW) tried to keep the "second job" aspect optional. But then game developers realized that they could deliberately engineer their games this way, and then sell players cheat codes that cost real-world money to skip the grind and get to the supposedly good bits. So now every game tries to be a second job, so they can justify selling microtransactions to people who have a first job to ostensibly get to the "good bits" of the game.
The only difference nowadays is how deadly serious everyone takes these metrics. It is absurd.