This does raise an interesting point of what singleplayer games even are for. People learn through play, but play is often quite divorced from reality to start with. The nasty, brutish and short lives of toy princesses become subtle intrigues of a fanfic and finally a schoolteacher tending to the social developments of a classroom.

Perhaps it's healthy to start out with a power fantasy like SimCity doing the city builder equivalent of hitting dolls against each other. Plopping down communes unilaterally and watching them bicker over inadequate commons before dropping a giant pile of bananas on them and sending in a tornado.

Of course SimCity itself is funneling towards Usamerican suburbia, but the unilateral player-is-god element seems like a perfectly healthy way to teach players the most basic basics of city-scale social organisation.