Superstition and Mendaciousness are Anti-Videogame

 The fact video games can't lie to you is what makes them unpopular, isn't it? 

 If you get shot and lose, the game can't pretend you didn't, the way it's supposed to. It can't flatter you and say you won anyway. 

 Some of them do, letting you through to the next level despite failing, but I guess the falsehood is too crude. Mortals aren't as dumb as they pretend, and they notice the game goals weren't achieved. 

 As a skew example, if a female character blatantly has twice the STR of an average male character, the lie is too gauche. Yes that's the lie you're supposed to tell, but you're telling it so badly it decreases the persuasiveness, rather than increasing it. "Women can be strong characters, but only in fantasy VG." Oopsie. "Women can be male strong characters, provided they're giant exothermic inhuman lizard-girls." lel

 

 Basically the same reason mortals hate math. Math can't give the high-status the right answer while giving the low-status the wrong answer. Getting the right answer is, of course, a cookie, and math will give even the sweatiest loser a cookie if they do the math right.
 Bad math! No cookie! Shit, math doesn't care, fuck...

 Worse, VG is seen as fun, unlike math. You can't gossip your way into a VG win (some steam forum exceptions) and it would be fun if you could... Horrifying, right? Lovecraftian, even.

 This would explain the surge in "narrative-driven" games. Minimize gameplay, maximize ingroup signalling. Tell, don't show, so that the local superstitions can be reinforced rather than disproven.

 If you read web novel reviews, you'll quickly notice that books let you read a completely different book than the one that was actually written. Not only can the story lie to you (so many gay royal road stories...basically all of them) but text will cheerfully let the reader lie to themselves. The reader can fail utterly to read what's there yet nobody can force them to believe otherwise. Not only can no book stop you from reading to the end if you want, you can just lie about it. Nobody else was reading what's there anyway, someone who didn't read it at all and just pretends will blend right in. Meanwhile with VG you might be asked to play, which reveals to even the most Satanic liar that you haven't played before. With math, even Satan wouldn't believe you if you pretend to get the right answer (string theory notwithstanding).  

 You can rig a soccer match.
 I guess that's why folk like world of tanks. You can rig a match of world of tanks, and indeed they do. Make sure the high-status team wins.
 I wonder if they rig fortnite matches? There's no way they don't, right?
 With overwatch they're more clever, they rig the teams rather than the match, so you always have someone else to blame...
 You can't rig a single-player game, though. Nobody has worked out how to make the deniability plausible. Players want to play a [[hard]] game like dark souls, but win because mommy smiled at them. If you make the game easy, generally sooner it will become obvious that it's easy. If nobody loses, it's not because gamers aren't losers, kek. The smoke will disperse, the mirrors will tarnish, and the illusion will shatter. Gamers need a game where everyone wins but not everyone is seen as winning.
 Basically some publisher should hire a bunch of folk to pretend to be bad at the game, to generate the illusion of a enormous mass of even bigger losers than your average gamer. Sockpuppet army. The game is irrelevant, coding is irrelevant, art and music are irrelevant, only the marketing matters. 

 Look at solitaire. You're the referee, so you know 100% if the ref was bought off. if you're not following the rules, you can't hide it from yourself. Cheating yourself is too crude even for Caino hypocriens.

 This is also the easy explanation for removing STEM jobs from the economy. Even factory stuff - you can't pretend the assembly line didn't jam if you happen to be high-status. Ref: theranos; there's only so long you can pretend to ship, even with other Satanists as counterparties. Hence, real jobs must be replaced with parasitic fluff sinecures handed out based on who you know rather than what you know.
 Satanist theocracies. Lies uber alles.
 Math isn't a coward and can't be intimidated into following the local black pope or black king. Hence, anyone good at math has to be expelled from society. No jobs can require math, lest the bosses be forced to hand them out on merit.

 Naturally, the fact math and VG can't lie to you is what I like about them. I can credibly signal discipline, for example.