Artistic Limitations Relieve Cognitive Bottlenecks

 Mortals refuse to use cognitive resources on anything except betraying their friends, and are functionally retarded in all other areas. Artistic limitations mean there are fewer factors to consider, and those factors vary less. This means it's not impossible for the artist to be willing to fit the whole piece of art in his mind at once, producing a coherent or sensible whole. Secondly there's a conformity dynamic.

 Stupid example: if the artist has five colours to choose from, it's very likely he will pick the optimal colour. If the artist has 20 billion colours to choose from, to get the optimal colour he either has to individually evaluate every colour one by one (lol) or construct some sort of filtering or search algorithm (lmao). 

 With billions of options, he instead recognizes a wonderful opportunity to use the huge space as an excuse to pick the worst colour, betraying his organization, his friends, and his society. "I looked really hard and this is the best I found!" Labour theory of value as conspiratorial plausible deniability. If he has a way to artificially impose colour limits on someone else (e.g. robocraft blocks) then he will deliberately choose the ugliest colours he thinks he can get away with - which is exactly what the other artists want as well. He's providing them an excuse to choose horrible colours. (Then folk stop playing robocraft because the ugliness pushes too hard against their Darwinian impulses.)  

 Since their friends largely deploy betrayal defences against nonconformists, it's important to appear to be as boring and slavishly obedient as possible. However, if it is physically impossible to conform, the artist has an excuse to be less boring than usual. 

 The palace in civilization 1 faced severe technical limitations. Consequently, they couldn't properly portray any real-world architecture. Consequently they had to come up with their own variation on architecture, consequently it's unique and interesting.
 Likewise the towns. They couldn't show construction scenes. The buildings appear by drawing random pixels with a distinctly electronic sound cue. This gives the impression of a truly different world, hinting at profound and imaginative intent. What is actually shown in civ1 is inferior to the real world, but if they had gone further down that path, it's clear it would be different and better than the real world. Its palace looks better than real palaces, and its libraries would have been more librarian than real libraries. The cities would be more civilized than real cities.
 Imagine a society so humble they would spontaneously raise up the already high. Imagine it was normal for taxes to be so low, and rule so good, that citizens would donate to the government out of gratitude. If that's unrealistic, then clearly the most important thing is not to disparage old games, but to work out how to make reality less realistic. Make the game civilization work like that, and improve the fidelity of the model until it functions as a real-world blueprint. Transition from developing computer games to developing real life.
 Naturally, when the limitations were lifted, they didn't go down that path. They discarded the art style they had developed, and made instead poor copies of the real world. I don't need construction pictures, game, I can see those by going outside.
 Microprose returned to mindless conformity.