I'm really coming around to the its-everything-and-nothing perspective, i.e. it depends on the person, their intentions, their character and situation.
Still, I think this fails to address one of the larger question, which is "do these games promote statism?" The post title is more about what we can learn personally, but I wonder what the effect is broadly, if anything is discernible at all. I need to do more reading 🤓
EDIT: btw I didn't address it, but that's really interesting. I would like to encourage you to write about this topic too in a post, I think you have thought fairly deeply about it and perhaps it would be a good compliment, in both senses of the word 😉
The systemic risk I think would be significantly guided by other ideological and inter-social factors in society. If Putin plays a video game, is he going to play it the same way and make the same take aways as if Obama did it? I don't think so.
Thank you for your thoughts. I'll see what I can do.