I'm still not buying it. The levels of care sims give to each attribute of the simulation could be the result of non-exhaustive game balance testing. They wanted to add crime. They wanted to make crime matter. They wanted something to combat crime, they added police. They tweaked values until it "felt good to play" and then shipped it - a commercial product on a budget and schedule. Zero people were likely employed to analyze how the game's systems might be perceived 30 years later.

That's the entire thing about ideology - you don't do it consciously, for most people the dominant ideology is the unknown knowns.

Video games are art. Adding crime in the way it was implemented is an artistic decision. Making crime dependent on policing instead of other, more realistic factors is also an artistic decision (and it's not true that police is the only way to handle crime from a gameplay perspective either). Balancing what exactly the sims are concerned about is also an artistic decisions.

Artistic decisions, especially when they seem obvious, are often ideologically motivated without someone even realising it, and this is both what the writer of Polygon was touching on as well as explicitly on of the things the author of Magnasantis was targetting.