Ryan Van Der Fleek 🧀

Game designers figured this out decades ago and it cost millions in failed launches. Will Wright built SimCity with a fully accurate traffic simulation. Testers hated it. The cars behaved realistically, which meant nobody could build a functioning city because real traffic is an unsolvable nightmare. He had to make the simulation dumber before the game became fun. The tension is permanent: the more accurately you model a system, the more it punishes the participant. Real medieval economies kept 90% of the population in subsistence farming. A historically accurate fantasy world doesn't produce heroes. It produces serfs. Tolkien solved this by making his economy deliberately vague. No one knows what a gold coin buys in Gondor. That ambiguity is a design choice, not a shortcut. The Reddit post is funny. The lesson underneath it is one of the hardest problems in simulation design: fidelity and fun are opposing forces, and you have to pick which one wins.