Acquiring/stealing/conquering techs from competing players via any means necessary in Civilization was a key means to closing the power gap with rivals on upper

Acquiring/stealing/conquering techs from competing players via any means necessary in Civilization was a key means to closing the power gap with rivals on upper levels of difficulty. China has done this to perfection in the real world. Stealing a tech was a massive diplomatic blow in Civilization. The US just shrugged (because the rich made a huge amount of money and increase of relative wealth status by acquiring a massive slave labor force in China rather than deal with the uppity American middle class). I just did a light google pass to see if any international relations academics have done anything with Sid Meier's Civ and various other types of games. I expected them to not, because of course academics are STILL "ew, computers" and even worse, it's gauche mass market entertainment. But the abstraction is, I would argue, more detailed than a lot of academic analyses which are largely bloviation, the game theory quantifiable and measurable, and reduces a lot of complexity that normally would be hard for a garden variety person (aka a gamer) to wrap their head around. Civ always tried dropping historical tidbits and education into it, but arguably its most potent contribution is simply the more honest treatment of history: civilizations rising and falling, fighting over resources, getting conquered, and getting destroyed, and the roles of economic strength, military strength, and tradeoffs.