These exercises are always half BS and half valuable insight that you can't even get from years of experience. It gets very hard to tell which is which though.
And now that we're roughly "there" and hugely elaborated experiences like Star Citizen are being produced, it's become all too clear that these games mostly reflect our beliefs and biases back at us, except where they directly follow from outcomes of nature and mathematics.
Speedrunning is compelling in that it reveals that inner nature behind the set dressing; optimizing towards a goal produces more profound phenomena than designed-in thumb-on-the-scale behavior.