The question takes on real importance when we realize that some games have reached many more people than any 50 or 100 scholarly treatises or textbooks combined. Indeed, the interactive quality of such simulated histories can make them diabolically absorbing. After many late nights of fevered empire-building, even the most bookish, sophisticated player can find them shaping his or her understanding of the ancient past. Though an acknowledged classic, Civilization II uses outmoded anthropological ideas. Microprose's Civilization II is still the acknowledged classic of the genre.
Civilization is an engrossing game, but it uses some very old anthropological ideas.
Notions that societies tend to develop along technological lines of descent, and develop from bands of hunter-gatherers through chiefdoms to states, were described more than a century ago by evolutionist thinkers like Herbert Spencer, E.B. Tylor, and Henry Lewis Morgan. It also promotes a nineteenth-century view of social politics, where different cultures are merely variations on a theme that naturally seem to evolve toward the European and the Western. It's no accident, for instance, that varieties of native architecture disappear as technology advances, and Maya and Zulu cities all start to look like midtown Manhattan. Microsoft's Age of Empires resembles Civilization insofar as players collect resources and scale a ladder of technology to survive and advance. Here the action is restricted roughly from the Neolithic to classical antiquity, proceeding in a fashion authors nonsensically call real time.