Of course :)

Games by their very nature are not real and even the ones which don’t directly adapt to your success or failure will certainly make concessions to reality and intentional design decisions which make the game more fun.

Personally I think game design is an intriguing subject and some of the ideas developers come up with are absolute genius, like the doom health bar you mentioned. It ramps up the tension, but yet it’s still finite, and if you play terribly you will die.

That to me is the difference. Tell white lies to the player to boost their fun, yes, but don’t remove all consequence with fake infinite health, a bike that steers itself, and QTEs that auto-succeed no matter what you do.

A game you can only win is a game with no agency, and that’s hardly a game at all.

People will play this like “Fucking hey! I aced that bike segment first time!” all proud of their gaming skills when the reality is you did absolutely nothing, my brother.

One way of thinking says maybe that’s okay. Maybe people just want to have a chill time and win and not struggle. Maybe that’s fine.

But on the other hand, it’s utterly deceptive.

To me, this is a reflection of the entirety of modern capitalism. Appeal to everyone. Don’t exclude anyone. Provide an illusion of choice while giving everyone the exact same homogenised experience. Provide the appearance of agency while removing all actual control.

I don’t like it.