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.
The author's previous series on Europa Universalis IV greatly emphasized that the game simulates a specific model of states, rather than trying to portray reality perfectly. This model is very similar to fields in Political Science such as realpolitik. Sim City is the same thing for high modernism in urban planning.
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.
Well, what the author is doing is a) using these games to explain themes of history (e.g., interstate relations, internal political tensions within the Long 19th Century), and b) critiquing how mechanics in these games do or do not reflect the history. It's the same vein of a city planner explaining how SimCity does and doesn't reflect real-life city planning, and such discussions absolutely do exist.
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.
It is more like comparing the game to real life to see how they hold up and teach how real life works than using a game simulation to say that's how life works.
It's like asking a master spy for his opinion on spy movies. They tell you what's real and what's bunk.
SimCity is neoliberal propaganda because elementary school me would keep on impatiently taking out big loans, making bad investments with them, and loosing in a debt doom spiral.
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
