Yeah... the culture of an MMO's player base is not exactly like a fandom, but there are some parallels here -- including the larger culture's general outlook of scorn and mistrust.

A fandom is a way of making a franchise into something more interactive, and I think honestly that greater interactivity is the way of the future. Once someone comes out with a total sandbox MMO -- by which I mean a way for people to tell their own stories or collaborate on stories using the interactive tools of an MMO, I'm going to have geekgasms from here to infinity.