certainly the heart of kill gameplay is not all this shit about games not having a purpose, but i think as art i am hard pressed to defend its function as effective rather than wasteful
when i observe discussions of systemic design and consequences i think, this is not the art form: this is some procedural paranoia attempting to make sense of the chaos that is life, this is seeing like a state, this is gameplay.
the outcome of a simulation is not reality.
if the outcome of a simulation step is not reality, and each simulation's state is dependent on its previous state, then the longer a simulation runs the further it gets away from reality. even a simulation based in every real feature of the world (how hot is the water? where is every player? what results when a meets b?) still produces at best a prediction, but usually something other than that.