The most insidious of these misguiding heuristics have, apparently due to their transparency (like water to a fish), gone unmentioned so far in this thread.

Typical game play shares much in common with typical schooling. Children are inculcated with impressions of a world of levels that can (and should) be ascended through mastery of skills corresponding to challenges presented to them at each level, with right action leading to convergence on right answers, within an effectively fixed and ultimately knowable context.

Contrast this with the "real world", where challenges are not presented but encountered, where it's generally better to do the right thing than to do things right, within a diverging context of increasing uncertainty.