It's a long time since I read the book, but it strikes me as a bizarre misreading. The article quotes the guy who discovered the game as saying:
> In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.
The effort of the officers in the book is meaningless, but it turns out the effort of all humanity for all of history is completely meaningless, because humanity is being manipulated by aliens to achieve a trivial purpose.
Which part of that quote do you think is a misreading? That's exactly how I remember it unfolding in the book.
All of human history is manipulated by the Tralfamadorians to get a single piece of metal to Titan to repair the Tralfamadorian spaceship. The army officers, you, me, everybody, we are all the result of Tralfamadore's plan.
Right, but I don't see anything in the quoted text implying that's not the case:
> In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.
Because either the person quoted or the article itself wants to highlight an apparent contradiction between making a wargame and writing the novel. If the point is that war is meaningless, then maybe there's a contradiction, but if the point is that everything is meaningless, then there isn't any more of a contradiction than eating breakfast is a contradiction.