I was an addict for a year or two in grad school! In fact, I wrote my first C code to automate some of the play, for those wee hours of the night or during class time when I couldn't actually be playing (if you had the same version, the admin set updates for 6 times a day or something like that, and it was hard to be able to take advantage of all 6 otherwise). And I learned a lot of what I know about programming from reading the "empire" source code... We had an administrator who was willing to let you take advantage of bugs in the code as long as you submitted a report of what the bug was, and preferably a fix...

Anyway... I see your point, but you're coming at it from a different angle than the energy problem. With cell phones or the internet, the "application" is what was unexpected - ubiquitous personal communicators etc. were science fiction, and not something society had been demanding for a long time. Similarly with internet applications, for the most part. But for energy supply, the "application" may vary between kilowatts on the powerlines or miles on the road or in the sky, but in any application, the fundamental requirement of usable energy is pretty much the same, almost fungible. The material world is different from the information world in that way.