For most of their history, videogames have been highly effective propaganda for the ideology of work. This is the idea that being an employee is what gives a person’s life meaning under modern capitalism, allied to the promise that effort will be rewarded. According to one line of analysis that began with the sociologist Max Weber, this is a transplantation of religious ideas into the economy: duty to God becomes a duty to one’s boss, and the reward of a heavenly afterlife becomes a promotion and pay rise.
Or, in videogames, a high score. Explicit employment simulations go back to arcade classics of the early 1980s such as Burger Time (1982), in which you, a hard-working chef, must climb up and down ladders to collect burger ingredients while avoiding “enemy foods” such as hot dogs and eggs. (The notion of “enemy foods”, interestingly, predates the modern outbreak of questionable food “intolerances”.)