What is status quo? The world is always changing. What's status quo now was new and flashy decades ago. There are also some things that stay status quo forever. We will always be carbon based life forms. Who decides which status quo is good or bad?
Games allow you to experiment with possibilities in a structured sandbox. The framework of the sandbox contains the bias of the programmer, but the gamer also has a large degree of freedom. Then throw in the meta question: Do you play by the rules of the game or do you exploit bugs or even write your own mods and hacks? Any game can be hacked, but so far, nobody is so great of a lifehacker to cheat death in real life.