It's more like the simulation authors can influence population of different places to have different religions, ideals and rules, to see which one would win. If you look at it, it could be some kind of optimization, you put different ideologies together and see how they interact (commerce, wars). This also allows avoiding cultural degeneracy, i.e. seeing some prosperous society turning into something horrible (e.g. sacrificing humans daily to make sun rise), that would be then killed off by a competing culture in an inevitable clash of cultures, leaving the stronger/more viable alive. I worry about globalization as a single unified culture because of human tendency to degenerate; having a cultural competition seems to be needed for humanity to progress.