It reminds me of the epiphany I had while playing strategy games - it began to feel like mucking around with a very large spreadsheet or database, and then it was difficult to see what separated my hours playing them from actual work.
(I went into IT because I liked solving challenging problems, not because I wanted a lucrative career.)
In other words, what's so bad about games looking like work, or work looking like a game, if they're deep, fun and engrossing? If the job or the game is terrible, discard it: maybe the real difference is we can't always discard the job because we need to survive.
It doesn't have to resemble real world constraints to be a useful exercise.
Gaming scratches the same itch as coding.
I like the Fire Emblem series but they come across as less legitimate as the elements of RPG grinding, character attributes and equipment management are introduced. Fire Emblem tries to introduce a "weapons triangle" with a rock-scissors-paper element but it's not very meaningful because it gets overwhelmed by the scaling of high level characters.