So it's about a game (which is fine), not real life (which one might assume from the title).
However, if you don't like this approach, there are posts on ACOUP that approach history more directly. For example, here's an excellent recent series that tackle the issue of the Roman ethnic identity:
https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-o...
Bret's piece is about how this game somehow manages to reflect Gat's theory (and actual history).
If you're wondering how it's 800 pages, the first 100 pages or so are about evidence for warfare in pre-agrarian society.
If you use SimCity and play optimally, everyone's life-expectancy sucks and remains uneducated, because those two stats literally don't matter. So you end up never building a hospital or school.
So people then point out mega-cities or whatever, and argue that the dystopian future has terrible health care and education. But... this is more a function of the game rather than the actual real world.
It's like asking a master spy for his opinion on spy movies. They tell you what's real and what's bunk.
I'd guess the reason for the division between optimal Sim City cities and cities in reality doesn't come from the game being a poor model, but that the high modernism model of urban planning has ridiculous conclusions.
Of course, one of the challenges of a historical game is that pop history does exist to a larger degree than other subjects, and you can get ferocious arguments of the historicity of the game where people use incorrect pop history as the basis. For EU4, colonization is absolutely in that boat; after the most recent patch, there is a vocal crowd about how ahistorical it is that North America is now filled with lots of natives that have to be conquered rather than empty land to be passively colonized.
The experience did warp my thinking for quite some time I think.
Monopoly was devised as a game to teach the evils of the free market. But Monopoly-world's rules don't match real life rules, enough so that its "lessons" have no bearing.
Some of those rules are 1) a finite board 2) finite number of players 3) no possibility for creating more products