Games of this nature are lauded for their educational value, and their capacity to inspire interest in history among the general public is I think undeniable. However, these games also have a tendency to create or reinforce certain modes of thinking about history. What do you consider to have been the net impact of these games on the public's level of knowledge? When discussing history, is there a noticeable difference between the players of these games and people of other backgrounds in terms of how they approach historical questions?
We don't really have a lot of evidence on this front. They have been studied a little by people trying to discern how valuable they are for teaching history (answer: maybe, but in the case I saw, a dissertation from a few years ago, it was a heavily modified version of Civ that required huge amounts of teacher integration that was studied), and the question of how valuable "casual exposure" sorts of things like this are (outside of anecdotes) on a larger scale. Much less how they build up, complement, conflict, etc., with people's models of history. (As an aside, the model of history in Civ is terrible, by historian's standards. At least my standards, anyway
In terms of conversations I have never really had anyone tell me who I've taught or otherwise interacted with in person that one of these games was important to their interest in history. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but it's never come up. Whereas people tell me all the time that, say, playing Fallout kindled a latent interest in nuclear weapons (even thought Fallout is frankly a terrible model for them).
In terms of net impact, frankly I'd expect there to be very little. How much history are you going to get out of Civ? It's not historical at all. It's a "model of history" that has a few "civilizations" and "leaders" but neither of the latter are anything more than superficial, and while in many ways the Civ model of history is "on rails" (you have to develop X before Y and so on), it isn't actually pegged to any actual development. One could ask, I guess, how it changes people views of technology — which is probably more apt. And again, in that case, I would worry that it changed it for the worse, that it gave people a linear, technologically-deterministic view of history, which historians today tend to think is wrong and misleading. But again, I don't see people actually invoking it — I've never had a conversation where someone said, "well, you've got to develop mathematics before you develop currency" (which is probably wrong anyway!). I suspect most people don't really internalize any of that stuff as "real" and not a game mechanic.
But again, I am just not sure that kind of impact has been studied. It would be nice if someone would study it — I'm interested in such topics. But I haven't seen anyone do it yet.