If by "real work" you mean force time distance, then suuuure. The entire software industry does very little "real work", since it doesn't take very much force to move the keys on a keyboard only a little bit down.
By real work I mean the process of actual wealth creation. I'm arguing that certain types of work are net positive wealth creation while others are net negative, meaning that more useful resources are consumed in the process of creating that good/service than the benefit to the system that this good/service provides.
Take my Assassin's Creed example. Consider all the electricity used to run their computers, the food and shelter needed for engineers and marketers, the raw materials needed for game parts and distribution. These resources are essentially burned or are outflows of the system, while providing very little inflow (that is directly or indirectly contributing to the creation of real wealth). The result is a net outflow of real wealth of the system.
As more and more people shift to such jobs, productivity gains in "net inflow" work will be partially distributed to those working in "net outflow" jobs.
I'm also not arguing that all software jobs are net outflow. Something like Google for example, could be argued as a net inflow, because fast information retrieval and distribution can greatly improve the overall efficiencies of the economic system.
Getting people to buy something doesn't always mean you provided them value. Some methods of making a buck are exploitative, like if they rely on deception, for example. There are scenarios where "middlemen" exist to take part of the wealth and not create any. Or where people are paid to be destructive for various reasons. A corrupt politician paid (in campaign donations, whatever) to pass a law to create a barrier to a market is being destructive, not constructive. It is a net loss overall.
A little hand-wavy but I will try to give some sort of definition.
If we assume that wealth can be measured with a non-negative real number, then we will set the zero point of the scale at total human extinction. If we set such a zero point, then we will assume that moving away from zero, that is moving away from extinction, is moving in a positive direction. Therefore, anything which contributes to the robustness and stability of the system could be argued as "wealth" or "valuable".
