As much as the slideshow points out a genuine, interesting question, what's a little frustrating is that presentation author then spends a good deal of time adv

As much as the slideshow points out a genuine, interesting question, what's a little frustrating is that presentation author then spends a good deal of time advocating for his own preferred utopian rulesets, with similar issues of micromanagement in a fundamentally shallow meta, and with similarly narrow, politically pointed assumptions. Don't get me wrong: it's perfectly understandable that people have preferences, and that questions of complexity and design introduce difficult trade-offs. I doubt I'm alone in finding rut micromanagement the most unfun part of sim games. Having to impose all sorts of tiny decisions all the time on sim population, in such a constrained rule space, that there are always only the same few optimal strategies to progress. Issue is not that there are optima, but all of that static micromanagement could be handled bottom-up (in sims, automatically). Fun play could derive more from variations in system dynamics, discrete shocks to rules, and in general, macro or meta decisions. But here am I replying to "this is not the exact game I would have designed" with "this is not the exact game I would have designed either, plus this is not an exact argument I would have made" – with me not even doing the actual work of gamemaking, unlike the author.