InThe Player of Games, the inciting incident for the main plot is that the titular character cheats, accepting help from an AI to maintain his reputation of ludic brilliance against an emerging rival who exhibits greater natural talent.
Subsequently, he is gently blackmailed into participating in a game on a distant planet where life is nasty, brutish, and short to an extreme degree, but where he is accepted as a guest because of his great reputation. The Minds have chosen this method to destabilize the current balance of power and bring the planet in question out of a particularly repugnant developmental minimum. It's ultimately revealed that even the initial moral misstep was not exploited but rather engineered by the Minds from the outset, and that the great player was never more than a pawn in their own games.
A short introduction to the culture of The culture can be found here, written by the author himself: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
Yes, the Minds can do everything but (pan-)humans still enjoys doing things for their own pleasure. Like for example learning to play an extremely difficult instrument while a Mind avatar taunts him by perfectly playing the same instrument. The Player of Games still plays games, although he couldn't ever win against a Mind.
And, should this be not enough, one can always leave The Culture and try and find meaning in the short, brutish lives of primitives people.