I was watching a podcast where this topic was discussed. I understand that the term carries some negative connotations amoung historians.
The games do (particularly the 5th and 6th iterations) seem to support a progressive form of history, however. As technology advances, inventions such as fertilizer improve agricultural yeilds, and all civilizations move forward in a linear fashion. Players develop more complicated ideologies and institutions over time, such as Liberalism or civil service. Leader and civilization abilities often emphasize high points in a nation's history, like the Achaemenid Golden Age, Ethiopian resiliency against Italy, and early modern Venetian trade dominance.
Would professional historians today regard the Civilization games as examples of "Whig History," or is this less applicable? How do Historians tend to assess the authenticity and effectiveness of these games as messengers of history to a broader audience?
The main historical sin of the Civilization series (in my mind) is that it is unabashedly technologically deterministic. It is entirely about the driving of society/culture/history by technology, especially (but not exclusively) in war, to the degree that it basically turns everything else into an engine of technology. Culture? Gets you technology. Cities? Engines of research and production. Systems of government? Give you points for various kinds of technological adaptations. (I am generalizing, mostly based on the last two Civs, but there you have it.)
None of the social institutions have anything to do with real social institutions. They all have to do with technology, in the end. It is the only resource that really matters, aside from raw military forces.
If one were going to describe its mode beyond technological determinism, I would argue it is a very crude Hegelianism — the player is some kind of Geist of history. Not necessarily Whiggish. (Whig history is about seeing the past as leading up to the present. Civ does that in some ways — practically all popular history does — but that is not its real sin, given that it is not about replicating the present world but creating some kind of alternative world.)
I wrote [a review](http://alexwellerstein.com/publications/wellerstein_reviewciv6(endeavour).pdf) of Civilization 6 from the perspective of a historian of science and technology recently — it's one historian's opinion, but it sums up my issues with the historical "model" that motivates the game. I am sure other reviewers (and historians) will take a different approach than I would!