[dsign]

FWIW I share your point of view. The article is as political as the game itself, they just take opposite stances.

That said, there is a kernel of a judicious argument about Progress in Real Life (PRL) and 4X games, and that's that real-life progress is deliciously complex, full of accidents and unpredictable. Real life progress is a roller coaster that for the most part goes up (don't take my word, just lookup the data), but people step on it coked to the bone on that opiate called "the news", and boy they are going to throw up to the smallest lurch ... but I digress...

4X games on the other hand lack all the complex system amplifiers, which is to expect because well they need to run in far more modest hardware than PRL, and for most people the 4X game itself is a relatively mild psychotropic that they use to counteract the effects of daily boredom and of the nick drugs : the apocalyptic phantasmagoria of click-bait media.