I'm not sure the video game analogy works because while you might never play video games, everyone watches films.
But that kind of illustrates the point following on now...
Tolkien fans, myself included, are Nerds (or Geeks or whatever is correct these days). And nerds are probably the biggest pedants you are ever likely to meet. Nothing is quite so enjoyable as proving your mastery of utterly trivial facts or winning an inconsequential argument about Balrog wings. It's also very important to make sure all the other fans know just how cool you are by making a big noise about dissing all the right things to diss and having all the right editions and not opening the packaging and so on and so forth. Rather like Comic Book Guy off The Simpsons.
It's something shared not just by Tolkien fans but also by fans of a hundred and one other things e.g. Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on...
And I say that with complete honesty, thinking about the hours I've wasted on Facebook doing the Lord of the Rings trivia challenge, the vast amounts of cash I've splurged on Tolkien stuff and the way I secretly hope someone will see my Tolkien Society badge when I'm haunting the sci-fi section in Waterstones...
We do it because it's fun and it's just part of the territory of being a nerdy fan. I do it even though I enjoyed the films so much I bought around 100 of the action figures.
"Worst episode ever..."