I've also been dabbled in such thought experiments with friends lately, and so far we've all landed at very different conclusions, even thought there are some reasons that it might make strategic sense at the moment.
This is monstrous in the real world with obviously real consequences. But I think too many people say “obviously government X wouldn’t act in a monstrous way” but the video game analogy helps you see the incentives and thus, why they would/do.
There are a diverse range of specific video game titles, but they are incredibly broad in content and scoring system.
What specifically are you actually talking about?
They can look useful at a certain level of conflict, but once you are thinking of war as being a tool for accomplishing policy goals (how modern nationstates view it), a lot of the things you would "want" to do stop being useful.
Wars that can be won quickly through decisive military action alone are quite rare historically! More often things like support/enmity of the local population, political will in the home state, support for recruiting or tolerance of conscription, influence of returning (whole, dead, injured, all) veterans on the social structure all become more decisive factors the longer a conflict runs.
That's normally where the international system has an influence, through sanctions or simply refusal to support the conflict, or deciding to support the other side, etc. Intentionally killing civilians would almost always fall in this category, but israel has apparently unlimited will to do it and is effectively unsanctionable in the current political environment, so it will continue.
Anyway there are much more illustrative examples that prove the rule, for example landmines. They aren't currently considered war crimes generally, but they are extremely damaging to civilian populations during & long after the conflict, and most countries have signed the treaties banning them. The countries that never signed are exactly the ones plausibly expecting to fight a war soon: US, china, russia, israel, iran, india, pakistan. And now some eastern european countries have withdrawn as well for similar reasons.
So from that you can kind of infer that landmines are probably very effective at their military goals, in a way that eg summary execution of prisoners or bombing hospitals may not be.