Some of the other comments here are discussing the extent and ways in which games do or don't succeed in modeling real conflict. Having read the article, I thin

Some of the other comments here are discussing the extent and ways in which games do or don't succeed in modeling real conflict. Having read the article, I think that's missing the forest for the trees. The thesis of this article is basically an analogy to the Sapir-Worf Hypothesis. The games that are common in a culture give rise to certain patterns or abstractions, and those serve as a starting "vocabulary" for approaching conflict. Those patterns also embed, and reinforce, cultural assumptions about conflict. The nature of the rules of the game (e.g. perfect-information or not) is not really as significant as the vocabulary they give us. So Chess gives us concepts like material advantage, and force-projection, and tempo. Those are concepts which still apply, to varying degrees, in games like Starcraft or LoL, despite those being real-time and having fog of war. Like Sapir-Worf, we can argue about the extent to which thought is actually molded by the available vocabulary. I think it makes ideas quantitively more accessible, which isn't the same as qualitatively unavailable. I think there is some value in examining to what extent a certain cultural assumption pervades all our models of conflict, and what the consequences are of invalidating that assumption. The article mentions the finite-ness of conflict, I'll bring up another which is the bounded-ness of the area of conflict.