I ended up cutting my teeth working on maintaining a MUD (that sadly just recently went offline). I think gaming is a big draw for tinkering and programming simply because how much time we spent interacting with it and how (at the time at least) it was very accessible to modify. A lot of what you're working on is changing data values and plugin-style things rather than getting bogged down in modeling and other much less approachable aspects of the game.

I imagine you can't throw a rock in the HN crowd without hitting someone who once worked on an EVE Online spreadsheet of one disposition or another.