If anything it teaches temperament, resource management, and how to turn failures into learning experiences - the last of which is considered important for being successful in business.
The way the professor set up the game it actually had grade-implicating consequences. The class before mine essentially sat down in a giant circle and worked together to solve the 'built in' problems so they could maximize their collective points for the exercise. My class...not so much.
By the end of our game, my country, as ringleader of a small coalition of willing and semi-willing participants were on the verge of total global domination (just needed one more turn). One country had been completely destroyed and all of its students received zero points for the exercise.
The professor and I met a few times in private and he was absolutely stunned at the divisive difference between the results. The 'cooperation' class taught him nothing, and the global warfare class was a ton of work (both calculating results and managing the social dynamics of college kids/semi-adults).
What we discussed at the end was how the flaw in the game seemed to be the 'ideological survey' initially used by him to group the teams together. I landed in the most "passive" group based on the survey results, but ended up being a much more hands-on, active leader and joined up with an "aggressive" collaborator. We agreed the passiveness meant that my team essentially didn't put up any resistance to me taking power, setting the scene, and letting them know they'd get the grade points just don't make waves.
Come to think of it, I still have the whole saga in mind as a long-form write-up so maybe I'll get around to that haha. As Megadeth pointed out, "Peace sells, but who's buying?"
I think I need to map out ways to tell the story, rather than just blurt it all out kind of like the above. I've been working a lot on Medium so stay tuned I guess haha
Edit: I've reached out to the professor from the course to see if he'd be interested in reading/critiquing my write-up, should I put one together. We'll see!
Rational actors will maximize their returns, and in a game that has a set number of rounds, the equilibrium won't be met unless there are returns and costs associated to each round.
Your professor should have graded on a running score, per turn, so that there would have been a reason (other than reputation cost with class peers) for the teams to collude up until the end. It would have also been more realistic for the course, since a decade of continued existence is considered more of a win for a political nation than some final tally at year 2050.
But you're right - it seems odd that a poli sci professor would give a team zero points if they were wiped out. What if they had previously used trade of luxury goods to maintain peace on a continent for centuries?
The 'wiped out, zero points' actually makes the most sense from a pragmatic standpoint. Figuratively speaking, you get zero points when your culture/society/etc is annihilated, wiped out. So there was an incentive to behave in a way to avoid being destroyed.
Just to sum things up, during the conflict & negotiation stage with the "victim" country, the coalition had them surrounded in one tiny town, otherwise taking over the rest of the country. When negotiations failed, the last holdouts were destroyed. It didn't have to end that way - the coalition was okay with letting them have a little compound and stay out of the way...but they didn't like that, made all sorts of demands and noise, and were eliminated out of convenience (my convenience, not necessarily the entire world's).
If the class is graded on a curve, then by making annihilation equal an instant 0 points, you've incentivized the teams to wipe each other out.