The old old games - the arcade games - were made difficult on purpose to farm coins for continues, in fact. Then with video games, publishers gradually started flipping it over to encourage players to complete their games and buy new ones
Eastern European here. Family gatherings must be almost universally like that. And then everyone is surprised I prefer just chilling on the internet and talking to my friends instead
tbh the page/word requirements are just as dumb as using chatgpt imo. as a general guideline for how much you need to go into details, sure, but literally counting pages and scoring based on that is not really the point of those assignments, I feel