Everything you currently experience is relative to your environment. If all you know is this environment, you don’t really know if there’s something else beyond it. You’re a prisoner or your brain and how it perceives things. Now imagine this is a game (a rudimentary simulation) and you don’t know what actual forces control you. You’d have no way of knowing apart from discovering some glitch that hinted at this being a simulation.

Ok imagine you are the character and the game teleports you or creates a thousand bricks of gold in front of view: you broke all laws of physics. So I think in-game PoW might be overrated