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Vladimir_Golovin comments on Human values differ as much as values can differ - Less Wrong
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Okay, to substantiate my position (per a few requests), I dispute that you can actually achieve the state where people only care about a few particular hierarchies, or even that people have significant choice in which hierarchies they care about. We're hardwired to care about status; this drive is not "up for grabs", and if you could turn off your caring for part of the status ranking, why couldn't you turn it all off?
Furthermore, I'm highly skeptical that e.g. the WOW superstar is actually fully content to remain in the position that being #1 in WOW affords him; rather, he's doing the best he can given his abilities, and this narrow focus on WOW is a kind of resignation. In a way I can kind of relate: in high school, I used to dominate German competitions and classes involving math or science. While that was great, it just shifted my attention to the orchestra classes and math/debate competitions that I couldn't dominate.
Now, you can dull the social influence on yourself that makes you care about status by staying away from the things that will make you compare yourself to the broader (e.g. non-WoW) society, but this is a devil's bargain: it has the same kind of effect on you as solitary confinement, just of a lesser magnitude. (And I can relate there too, if anyone's interested.)
I think the WOW superstar would, if he could, trade his position for one comparable to the #100 tennis player in a heartbeat. And how many mistresses does #1 in Wow convert to?
I don't know about in-game WoW superstars, but I knew an admin of an "unofficial" Russian server of a major AAA MMORPG, and he said that basically all female players of that server he met in real life wanted to go to bed with him. This might have been an exaggeration, but I can confirm at least one date. BTW, I wouldn't rate the guy as attractive.
In the 1990s I happened upon a game of Vampire (a live-action role-playing game) being played outdoors at night on the campus of UC Berkeley. After the game, I happened to be sitting around at Durant Food Court (a cluster of restaurants near campus) when I overheard one of the female players throw herself at one of the organizers: "How many experience points would I need to go to bed with you?" she asked playfully. (The organizer threw me a juicy grin on the side a few moments later, which I took as confirmation that the offer was genuine.)
I am guessing that in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, political success and political advantage consisted largely of things very much like being able to get a dozen people to spend an evening in some organized activity that you run.
ADDED. Now that I have had time to reflect, what she probably said is, "how many experience points do I get for . . .", which is a wittier come-on than the one I originally wrote and which jibes with the fact that one of the organizer's jobs during the game is to award experience points to players.
Interesting; I guess I underestimated the position of unofficial Russian WoW server admins in the meta-hierarchy -- in part because I didn't expect as many desirable Russian women to play WoW.
If the server population is a couple thousand players, and there are 5% of females among them, that leaves you with about 100 females, 10 of which will likely be attractive to you -- and if you run a dozen servers or so, that's definitely not a bad deal if you ask me :)