A strategy game set in North America has to express settlement, conflict and economy as systems. Those systems are interpretive decisions, and design teams treat them as such.
Mechanics make arguments whether or not they intend to
Representing territory as empty space to be claimed states something. Representing it as inhabited land with existing polities states something different.
Neither is a neutral default, because the rules determine what actions the player can take and what those actions cost them.
Designers working on American historical settings generally accept this openly, and the debates inside the genre are about which framing to choose rather than whether one exists.
Playability pushes toward abstraction
A game cannot model every nation, treaty and internal faction, so groups are consolidated and timelines compressed into manageable units.
Consolidation flattens differences between distinct peoples and distinct periods, and the flattening is more visible for some subjects than for others.
Teams often respond by adding descriptive text that carries the detail the rules cannot, separating what the simulation does from what the game says about it.
Consultation changes the design earlier than the text
Studios working on sensitive American historical material increasingly bring in historians and community consultants during design rather than at the writing stage.
Late consultation can only adjust presentation, since the systems are already built and their assumptions are already fixed.
Early involvement can change what the systems model at all, which is a more expensive commitment and a more consequential one.
Player agency conflicts with historical outcome
Strategy games promise that decisions matter, which means allowing outcomes that did not happen, including ones a player may find uncomfortable to enact.
Constraining the possibility space protects against certain uses and undercuts the genre's central appeal, so most designs allow divergence and frame it clearly.
Framing does real work here: a mechanic labeled plainly reads differently from the same mechanic presented as an achievement to pursue.
Education and entertainment pull apart
Classrooms in the United States sometimes use strategy games to teach systems thinking, and teachers value the causal reasoning the genre requires.
What the games are poor at is nuance about specific events, since a rule that fires reliably teaches regularity where the record shows contingency.
The useful version of the claim is narrow. These games teach how constraints interact, and they are best paired with sources that supply the particulars.