Not to feed the addiction, but that's pretty much exactly what SpaceChem does. You're programming, without programming. And you have some very clearly defined limits, letting you be remarkably creative with your solutions.
Now then, that doesn't apply well to a real world problem, but there are definitely parallels.
I love SpaceChem! Fantastic game...though when I'm playing it, I think "I should just be programming instead." If only SpaceChem had more freedom and could actually create code.
Spacechem is essentially dataflow programming. Unfortunately the canvas size is to small to do general purpose computing. If you could have a lot lot more reactors, then you could encode useful data in the molecules and use the pipelines as queues to simulate memory buffers and, well, obviously queues.
I believe someone already did this in Minecraft.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/09/minecraft-users-go-wild-b...
The real zen moment is when you realize you don't need someone to "gamify" life for you, but can simply choose to see life as a game.
Or you could be a realist and recognize that some people need help to see life and problems as a games :)
Already being done in at least one important domain: http://fold.it/portal/
One day I imagine we'll be able to map real world problems to video games, in a way that doesn't require knowledge of the solution to create the mapping.
Programming itself is very similar to a game. If someone could make it into a virtual world, where I "write" code simply by putting together various machines in 3D space...well, that would be fun :)