As the game gets harder with higher utilization you should be able to "buy" upgrades with tokens that you "earn" for hitting milestones or performance targets t

As the game gets harder with higher utilization you should be able to "buy" upgrades with tokens that you "earn" for hitting milestones or performance targets that automate small mundane tasks. Kinda like the universal paperclips game. Then you throw pathological workloads at the user that thwart the simple automations so you have to unstick it manually. So the user buys upgrades to slightly better automations, thwarted again by slightly more pathological workloads... Boom game progression loop.