is it a game? or is it an ideology that functions much like a secular religion?
Several things at once, I guess. The managerial class is both a cult and serves an economic function, though the ideology of "rule by technocratic expert managers" serves to reinforce their so-called economic necessity.
It's also a game. The Romans had the coliseum where public enemies and barbarians could be fed to lions or made to fight gladiators. We have two parties, the press, and social media.
Edit: as a member of the managerial class, notice how much he enjoys power being exercised on you. Why? Because it publicly reinforces his necessity. I watched this in the last project I was on. I was one of the two guys on the physical end though I wrote a bunch of software to control that aspect. The other guy gave up and retired. He was a very good senior engineer with several patents and wanted to keep working but things were too effed up and they were ignoring our suggestions to fix it.. I left for a competitor. The manager didn't seem to care and was going to re-hire a guy laid-off in previous years which would set the program back months. IOW, they see guys like us as reserve, exchangeable labor and don't care if they don't have a product, or at least don't notice until it's gone. Ironically, he was just in this exact situation - he was a contractor writing code that had been laid-off in previous years. The minute his station was re-instated he went right back to being a bugman.