Simulation design blasted open the black box, forcing people to articulate and concretize their own tacit mental models and, in doing so, confront and reconceptualize their understandings.

and SimLife (1992).

urban dynamics could, in theory, model homelessness while SimCity cannot.

To make SimCity, Wright reconciled the top-down (and nonspatial) representation of system dynamics with other approaches, like cellular automata and game sprites, where behavior emerges, bottom-up, from interacting parts situated in space.

toys, which he sees as “free-form,” “open-ended,” and available to experimentation and recombination, unlike games, which “tend to be isolated universes where there’s a rule set, and once you leave that universe the rule set is meaningless.”

“the cultural pervasiveness of simulation” is a call to “develop a new social criticism” whose aim would be to help people understand, challenge, and rewrite simulation rules.

software itself is a form of simulation; software directs the computer’s protean ability to simulate any other symbolic machine.

children are actually active builders of knowledge—little scientists who are constantly creating and testing their own theories of the world.

This may also be so because, as some cognitive scientists contend, the core of human cognition is analogical.