Play is a mechanism by which humans practice skills in a safe environment before needing them for real. This is part of why so many people try to use video games sometimes to grasp harsher, more inaccessible realities, like war, or geopolitics.

So long as you remember that the game is skewed towards being fun, and as a result, has to misrepresent reality to just be enjoyable, this can be used to assist in quality education.

I would not have grasped certain things about the pioneering days as easily without Oregon Trail for instance. Today, a game like EU4 can help demonstrate certain principles in history. Just so long as you remember that the game has to be fun, where the actual leaders experiencing similar stuff probably hated a lot of it, and didn’t have the option to savescum, start over when they fucked up, or even just pick a different game to play.

edit: Forgot to tie that all together. Anyways, put people who are still developing skills into an environment where they can “play” at something, even life and death politics, and they will.