I remember the small games you could find and play in your hud in system shock, they were pretty cool. However nobody really played them since the main game had actual fun gameplay in itself...

Exactly what Janne said. Maybe the creators of the game should make it a bit more immersive and less of a time sink and the need for sub-games which pass the time will go away. SWG recently introduced a card game, similar to magic and the card game that SOE has in EQII. Maybe we are seeing an overarching theme here MMO devs? Less time sinks, more game play! It's super easy, and intimates to laziness, to make time sink based quests - go kill 100 monsters, come talk to me. What is hard is to create quests which make the player feel involved in the story line rather than just a side-line player gathering junk for an NPC, killing some gawd awful amount of creatures to get one item, or, the worst, a 20 minute cross server trip just to deliver some token to some guy who will send you on more meaningless quests.