Honestly, just the idea that there are tradeoffs is a lesson worth teaching. That's a lesson plenty of people haven't learned.

The difference between zero and history-with-bias is more important than the difference to neutral-bias, which a kid probably wouldn't be equipped to unpack the nuance of anyway.

In Civilization, implementing Democracy reduces governmental corruption in all cities by 100%. It will more than double your GDP unless you were already a Republic.

It is not possible to be competitive in research production unless you are a Republic or a Democracy, which is an interesting interpretation of classical history.

I once tried to make a socialist paradise in SimCity, but the game moved all my town's people out due to high taxes.

There was recently a story here about sim city that discussed some of these limitations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27593081. If you search for sim city on HN you’ll find several more. In addition to emergent functionality that we don’t foresee when we create a program there’s this other side of impossible functionality that we also embed in the design that we sometimes don’t realize.

Are there any real-life approximations of this situation?