I attended high school in the US in the early 00’s and cell phones were absolutely banned from classrooms. You could keep them in your locker and use them between classes, but that was it.
I attended college in the late 00’s, and I don’t think I took a single digital exam. Quizzes, sure, but for final exams even CS was pencil and paper (or a final project, which admittedly will have issues in the post-LLM era).
FWIW there is a new-ish kind of intermediate genre between classic LAN/ranked multiplayer and single player, which is the whole “survival” genre. Generally speaking, they can be played as single player games, but also allow for small-scale co-op, synchronously or asynchronously. So even if you and a buddy have different schedules, you can make progress separately but still occasionally play together.
Valheim, Grounded, Ark, Satisfactory are a few among many others.
Is this any different than the incentives set up by conventional publicly listed companies? Like a CEO in principle could “take a dive” but their compensation discourages that.