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Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net, a seminal work of cyberpunk, made the point that video games that become harder and harder until you eventually succumb was a keenly Cold War mentality about entertainment. The nihilism of struggling against antagonists until they beat you was held up as a symptom of the core belief that eventually we'd all get nuked anyway. It actually plays into the core plot of the story, which is fundamentally about the uneasy border between optimism and pessimism in futurism.