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the book · 16
Chapter 1. Same parts
RimWorld, in parts · Rare parts · How much of a game is core · The grid · The most common parts · One name, many rules · What the names are for · Names still missing · Exercise: decompose a game
Chapter 2. Six layers
Substrate: what exists · Dynamics: how it changes · Coupling: how systems touch · Control: how intent enters · Legibility: how the state gets out · Pacing and stakes: when to look and what is lost · Where genres spend · Exercise: profile a game by layer
Chapter 3. Old parts
Dating a mechanic · Most of it by 2000 · A test of the claim · The founding games · What came after · Careers · Built from older parts · Named influences · Exercise: date a game
Chapter 4. Families
What the two games share · How the families are drawn · Families that cross genres · Series and descendants · Reading a family · How much genre explains · Where the method is weak · Exercise: place a game
Chapter 5. Depth costs legibility
Two scores · What the scores show · Readable rules, unreadable results · Harder to balance · Expensive and hidden · Hard reads · Mechanics that own nothing · Hidden on purpose · Choosing a point on the slope · Exercise: trace a collapse
Chapter 6. Five ceilings
Content made by hand · Ticks per second · What a player can follow · Same inputs, same world · Minds made of formulas · Lifting one ceiling spends another · The ceilings move at different speeds · Exercise: find the ceiling
Chapter 7. What shipped
How the dataset counts maturity · The one norm: frames · Assets, places, and motion · Characters that talk · Societies in the lab · Opponents and tools · What writes into the simulation · Prototypes beside the engine · Reproducibility · How it was received · Exercise: classify an AI feature
Chapter 8. Where AI lands
Seven ways to change a mechanic · Where the set comes from · Counting exposure · What the techniques would change · The economic core · Research that would tune the economy · The most exposed mechanics · Judgment against evidence · Exercise: aim a technique
Chapter 9. Vacant lots
Packages · Lots no one has built · Five lots · Goals and open runs · Two kinds of city builder · Two more lineages · Lots already built · What makes a lot worth building · Exercise: survey a lot
Chapter 10. Bets
What a bet contains · The top of the list · A colonist with a memory · The pattern behind the list · Storytellers and events · Orders and managers · Laws written by players · Further down · Search and emulators · Bets outside games · Who should build what · Exercise: write a bet
Chapter 11. What breaks
The same inputs, the same world · Where the computation happens · Contradiction · Opaque replacements · The bill · Latency · Steering and checking · Trust, authorship, and safety · Provenance · Labor and safety · Risks the bets name · A log as the fix · Exercise: trace a failure
Chapter 12. Keeping score
A bet that can lose · Reading criteria literally · What counts as evidence · What does not count · Who may resolve one · What a checker has to establish · The two quiet outcomes · A prediction that was true when written · Horizon and date · What the scoreboard will show · Exercise: resolve one early
Chapter 13. How the book checks itself
Everything is a build · One file per record · Eleven ways to drift · Failures that shaped the rules · A field and a mechanic that disagreed · Four pilots · Status is a claim about evidence · Runs and their limits · How to contribute
Glossary of mechanics
Resources & production · Logistics & networks · Economy & finance · Agents & behavior · Social relations · Population & lineage · Governance & policy · Space & construction · Physics & materials · Environment & ecology · Biology & health · Time & pacing · Information & legibility · Control & automation · Progression & goals · Risk & failure · Narrative & generation · World generation · Multiplayer & persistence · Conflict & defense · Operation & procedure
episodes · 12
Every simulation game is made of the same parts
RimWorld taken apart into its mechanics, then every game in the catalog the same way. The most common parts simulate nothing, the parts a game can't do without are much rarer, and each genre spends its parts differently.
Where the parts came from
Hamurabi, from 1968, already used parts that games still use. Most of the vocabulary was in a catalog game by 2000, a test against chance shows how much of that comes from parts being widely shared, and recent games are built mostly from old parts.
Families across genres
Group games by their mechanics instead of their genre and families appear: series that stay together, a sequel that moved, and odd couples like Papers, Please and Princess Maker 2. How the families are drawn, how far they match genre, and where they fall apart.
Why deep systems are hard to read
A flooded fortress in Dwarf Fortress shows a chain of causes the player never sees. Mechanics that produce more variety are rated harder to read and harder to balance, and designers answered with mechanics that simulate nothing and only show what the others hold.
The five ceilings
Five limits on simulation games: content made by hand, ticks per second, what a player can follow, the same inputs giving the same world, and believable minds. Lifting one usually spends another, and the cost of authoring is falling fastest.
What AI shipped
Which AI techniques have shipped in simulation games, and how far. Neural rendering is the one that is normal; talking characters, opponents, and tools players never see have shipped in fewer games, and the few that change a game's state can break its replays.
Where AI lands
Infinite Craft stores a language model's answer and treats it as a rule. Counting every technique against every mechanic shows research aimed at generative content, while the economic core most games are built from has almost nothing aimed at it.
Vacant lots
Pairs of common mechanics that almost never share a game, like a city builder that tells stories or a production game whose workers grow old. A few lots are already built by a single game, and some may stay empty for good reason.
Bets worth making
The dataset's bets on what to build next, each with an experiment and a dated prediction: a button that asks why, a preview of possible futures, colonists with a memory, mods written as a sentence. None of the leading bets asks a model to become the simulation.
What breaks
How AI features break simulation games: desyncs when a search stops by the clock, contradictions, models that replace rules players could read, the running cost of model calls, and trust. A log that records the model's decisions keeps such a game replayable.
Keeping score
How the dataset's predictions are written so they can lose, when they come due, and who is allowed to check them. Once results arrive, the scoreboard also tests whether the rankings behind the bets meant anything.
How this was made
How the dataset behind the series is built and checked: plain-text records, everything rebuilt on every change, rules that came from failures, a record of every run, and what the checks can't see. It ends on how anyone can extend it.
shorts · 12
The five most common parts
The five parts that turn up most often in simulation games don't simulate anything.
Every part of Stardew Valley is older than it
Every part of Stardew Valley appears in an earlier game in our catalog.
A border post and a daughter
A border-checkpoint game from 2013 and a daughter-raising game from 1993 belong to the same family.
Decorating makes the raids bigger
In RimWorld, decorating your colony makes the raids bigger.
The refrigerator knows
In The Sims, the knowledge of how to eat is stored in the refrigerator.
The one AI technique that's normal
Of the AI techniques in our dataset, exactly one has become normal in games, and it never touches the simulation.
Most used, barely touched
The kind of mechanic simulation games use most is among the kinds AI research has touched least.
City builders don't tell stories
Only one game in our catalog lets you place buildings and also runs chains of story events: 77 games do the first, 17 the second.
The why button
The AI feature our dataset ranks highest for simulation games is a button that asks why.
The faster computer
A faster computer can break a multiplayer game when the AI opponent thinks by the clock.
Due on the same day
9 predictions about AI in simulation games come due on the same day, December 31, 2027.
The parts the agents skipped
The most common parts of simulation games almost went uncounted in our dataset.
games · 177
A Tale in the Desert
A combat-free MMO set in ancient Egypt in which players gather, craft, and build, pass tests in several disciplines, and govern the world through player-written petitions and votes, with the world wiped and restarted at the end of each Telling.
Against the Storm
A roguelite city builder in which each settlement must fill a reputation gauge before the Queen's impatience runs out, balancing three villager species' needs while opening dangerous forest glades under a recurring blightstorm.
AI Dungeon
A text adventure in which a large language model continues the story after each player input, so actions, dialogue, and world facts the player types are improvised into narration rather than resolved by authored rules.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
A Nintendo life sim on a deserted island whose clock, seasons, and wildlife follow the real calendar, built around gathering, D.I.Y. crafting, museum collections, villager relationships, and island design.
Anno 117: Pax Romana
A Roman-era Anno city builder in which residents advance from Liberti to Patricians through categorized needs, buildings affect their neighbors, schools generate research, and modular ships guard multi-island trade.
Anno 1800
An industrial-era city builder in which residents advance through five Old World tiers by consuming goods from multi-island production chains, linked to a New World session by trade routes and contested by AI rivals.
Arma 3
A first-person military simulation on large open terrains in which infantry, vehicles, and aircraft fight under modeled ballistics, recoil, and load-based stamina, extended by the Eden editor, SQF scripting, and a large mod community.
Aurora 4X
A free space 4X simulation by a single developer in which the player runs an interstellar empire through ship design from components, mineral mining, sensor-based detection, missile and beam combat, and named officers, with time advanced in steps from seconds to days.
Autonauts
A colony automation game in which the player crafts workerbots from parts and teaches them farming, crafting, and cooking routines in a Scratch-style visual language, so that bots supply the food, housing, and care that a growing population of Folk needs.
Balance of Power
A Cold War geopolitical sim in which the player, as US or Soviet leader, spends aid, treaties, and interventions on minor countries over eight annual turns and manages escalating crises to gain prestige without triggering nuclear war.
Banished
A survival city builder without money or a tech tree in which exiled families gather, farm, and stockpile for winter while aging, births, disease, and disasters decide whether the town grows or starves.
BeamNG.drive
A vehicle sim built on soft-body physics in which every vehicle is a node-and-beam skeleton that flexes, deforms, and breaks under impact, played as a free-roam sandbox with scenarios.
Besiege
A physics construction game where the player builds medieval siege machines from blocks, wheels, and weapons, then drives them against castles and armies in objective levels or a sandbox.
Big Ambitions
A business life sim set in a simulated New York City in which the player's avatar rents storefronts, stocks and staffs shops, builds warehouse logistics, and grows from one store into a business empire.
Big Pharma
A pharmaceutical factory and business sim in which the player routes ingredients through machines on conveyor belts to push their concentration into the range that activates cures while suppressing side effects, then sells into contested markets.
Bitburner
A free, open-source incremental hacking game in which the player writes JavaScript scripts that hack, grow, and weaken simulated servers for money, then spends it with faction reputation on augmentations that reset progress in exchange for permanent multipliers.
Black & White
A god game in which the player wins villagers' belief through miracles, help, or fear while training a giant creature whose behavior is learned from the player's rewards and punishments.
Caesar III
A Roman city builder in which service walkers roam the roads from their buildings, houses evolve only where food, goods, and services actually reach them, and missions are won on culture, prosperity, peace, and favor ratings.
Capitalism
A corporate business sim in which the player builds retail stores, factories, farms, mines, and R&D centers from internal unit layouts and competes with AI firms on price, quality, and brand across city markets.
Captain of Industry
An industrial colony builder in which the player reshapes island terrain with excavators and trucks, runs production chains to feed, house, and power a settlement, and spends the Unity its satisfied population generates on edicts, quick builds, and world-map expansion.
Car Mechanic Simulator 2021
A first-person garage sim in which the player diagnoses and repairs customer cars part by part, restores auction and barn-find cars, and expands the workshop.
Caves of Qud
A science-fantasy roguelike RPG with simulated factions, liquids, body parts, and procedurally generated histories, built partly with wave function collapse.
Cities: Skylines
A city builder in which road-following zones, agent citizens who route to work along computed paths, district policies, and player-drawn transit lines make traffic flow the central design problem.
Cities: Skylines II
The sequel to Cities: Skylines, with citizens choosing routes by time, comfort, and money, a tech tree of development points, preset climates with seasons, and maps of up to 441 tiles.
Command: Modern Operations
A real-time operational military simulation in which the player commands air, naval, and land units drawn from a database of tens of thousands of real platforms, sensors, and weapons on a map of Earth, managing doctrine, emissions control, and missions.
Contraband Police
A first-person border-post sim set in 1981 in which the player checks drivers' documents, searches vehicles for hidden contraband, chases smugglers, and upgrades the post against gang attacks.
Conway's Game of Life
A zero-player cellular automaton on an infinite square grid in which each cell lives or dies by the B3/S23 neighbor-count rule, producing gliders, oscillators, and universal computation from a seeded pattern.
Creatures
An artificial-life game in which the player hatches and raises Norns whose neural-network brains, simulated biochemistry, and haploid digital genomes produce learned behavior and heritable mutation.
Crusader Kings III
A character-driven grand strategy game in which the player rules as successive heads of a medieval dynasty from 867 or later to 1453, managing traits, stress, vassal opinion, marriages, and succession across a map of feudal titles.
DCS World
A combat flight sim platform of study-level aircraft modules with clickable cockpits and modeled subsystems, flown in missions and on multiplayer servers built with a Lua-scriptable mission editor.
Democracy 4
A turn-based government sim in which the player, as leader of a democracy, adjusts policy sliders whose weighted effects move statistics and overlapping voter groups, resolves dilemmas, and tries to balance the budget and win the next election.
Don't Starve
A survival sim in a procedurally generated wilderness where the player balances hunger, health, and sanity, crafts tools and light, and prepares for darkness, hounds, and seasons.
Dwarf Fortress
A colony sim in which the player directs a fortress of autonomous dwarves inside a procedurally generated world whose history, geology, fluids, bodies, and minds are all simulated.
Dyson Sphere Program
A 3D factory automation game in which the player's mech builds production lines on rotating planets, links star systems with logistics drones and warp vessels, and launches sails and rockets to assemble Dyson spheres around stars.
Eco
A multiplayer civilization survival game in which players on one server share a simulated ecosystem, specialize in skills, craft and trade with player-made currencies, and pass enforceable laws while researching how to stop a meteor due in thirty days without wrecking the environment.
Elite
A 3D space trading and combat game in which the player flies a single ship through eight seed-generated galaxies, buying and selling cargo and fighting pirates and police to raise a combat rating.
Elite Dangerous
An online space sim set in a 1:1 procedurally generated Milky Way where players trade, fight, mine, and explore while a server-side background simulation shifts faction control from aggregate player actions.
Equilinox
A relaxed nature-building game in which the player spreads biomes with grasses, places plants and animals that each have environmental requirements, and spends diversity points earned by healthy species on evolutions and genetic modifications.
Euro Truck Simulator 2
A truck driving sim in which the player hauls timed cargo deliveries across a scaled European road network and grows a transport company of trucks, garages, and hired drivers.
Europa Universalis IV
A real-time-with-pause grand strategy game in which the player directs one of over 500 nations from 1444 to 1821 through monarch-point spending, trade-node competition, colonization, diplomacy, and war on a province map.
EVE Online
A single-universe space MMO in which players mine, manufacture, trade, and fight in ships that are destroyed for good, inside a player-made economy and a galaxy of high-, low-, and null-security space where player alliances claim sovereignty.
Factorio
A factory automation game in which the player builds belt, train, robot, and circuit networks that mine, refine, and assemble items on an alien planet while pollution provokes native biters that evolve over time.
Fallout Shelter
A vault management sim in which the Overseer builds rooms in an underground shelter, assigns dwellers to power, food, and water production by their SPECIAL stats, and grows the population through recruitment, rescue, and breeding.
Farming Simulator 25
The 2024 entry in Giants Software's series in which the player runs a farm business by operating over 400 licensed vehicles and implements across seasonal field work, livestock, forestry, and production chains.
Farthest Frontier
A frontier-town city builder in which crop rotation, soil fertility, diet variety, clean water, and healers decide whether named diseases spread, while prosperity draws stronger raiders against walled defenses.
Façade
A free 2005 interactive drama in which the player types natural language as a dinner guest of the married couple Grace and Trip while a drama manager sequences authored beats toward one of three endings.
Football Manager
A football club management series in which the player sets tactics, training, transfers, and finances while a match engine simulates games from the attributes of players drawn from a researched database of real footballers.
Foundation
A gridless medieval city builder in which painted zones grow homes organically, monuments are assembled from modular parts, and the village advances along Labor, Clergy, or Kingdom estates.
From Dust
A god game in which the player carries sand, water, and lava across islands whose material simulation erodes, floods, and hardens terrain, protecting a tribe as it founds villages at totems.
Frostpunk
A survival city builder in which the leader of the last city around a coal generator must keep falling temperatures at bay while signing laws that trade citizens' welfare against productivity under hope and discontent meters.
Frostpunk 2
The sequel to Frostpunk, in which the Steward builds whole districts on the frost and must pass laws through a council of 100 faction delegates while faction tension can escalate into civil war.
FTL: Faster Than Light
A roguelite starship sim where the player allocates reactor power and directs crew through room-level oxygen, fire, breach, and system-damage simulation while fleeing a rebel fleet across eight sectors.
Game Dev Story
A game-studio management sim in which the player hires and trains staff, licenses consoles, and develops games from genre and type combinations that four critics score across a twenty-year span.
Game Dev Tycoon
A game-studio business sim where the player picks topic, genre, and platform for each game, splits development effort across design and technology focus areas, and lives or dies by review scores across the history of the industry.
Garry's Mod
A Source engine physics sandbox in which players spawn props, ragdolls, and NPCs, join them with welds and constraints, and script whole new multiplayer game modes in Lua.
Generative Agents (Smallville)
A research sandbox in which 25 language-model agents in a Sims-like town keep natural-language memory streams, reflect, and plan their days, producing unscripted information spread and social coordination.
Going Medieval
A colony sim set after a plague in which settlers with traits, needs, and moods dig into and build up a multi-level voxel terrain to survive seasons and raids.
Gran Turismo
A PlayStation racing game that paired a tuned handling model and 140 production cars with license tests, prize credits, and parts tuning in a Simulation mode career.
Gran Turismo 7
A console racing simulator that combines a detailed vehicle dynamics model and car collection with GT Sophy, a deep reinforcement learning opponent added as a permanent rival in 2023.
Hamurabi
A ten-turn text game in which the player, as the Babylonian king Hammurabi, splits a grain stock between feeding people, planting acres, and buying land while harvests, rats, and plague vary at random.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
A zero-gravity salvage sim in which the player cuts derelict ships apart with a laser cutter and grapple, manages decompression and volatile systems, and sorts salvage to pay down a large debt.
Harvest Moon
An early farming sim for the Super Famicom in which the player has two and a half years to restore an inherited farm through daily crop watering, livestock care, and courting one of five eligible women.
Hearts of Iron IV
A World War II grand strategy game starting in 1936 or 1939 in which the player builds factories, turns resources into equipment, designs divisions, follows a national focus tree, and directs fronts and battle plans across land, sea, and air.
House Flipper
A first-person renovation sim in which the player cleans, paints, demolishes, and furnishes rundown houses, then sells them to buyers whose bids depend on how well the house fits their needs.
Infinite Craft
A browser crafting game in which combining any two elements yields a new element whose name and emoji a language model generates on first request and a shared database then fixes for all players.
inZOI
A Krafton life sim in early access since March 2025 in which the player oversees autonomous Zois with eight needs in dense cities, with optional on-device language model prompts and generative tools for patterns and objects.
iRacing
A subscription online racing sim with laser-scanned cars and tracks in which drivers race scheduled official series and advance through license classes gated by a no-fault Safety Rating, while an Elo-style iRating sorts fields.
Islanders
A minimalist placement puzzle in which every building scores points from compatible and incompatible neighbors on a procedural island, and score thresholds unlock new building packs and new islands.
Job Simulator
A room-scale VR comedy set in a museum run by robots, where the player performs parodied office, kitchen, store, and garage tasks by grabbing and manipulating physics objects.
Jurassic World Evolution
A dinosaur park management game in which the player excavates fossils for DNA, breeds and modifies dinosaurs, and keeps them contained through storms, sabotage, and breakouts while balancing three division contracts.
Kenshi
A squad-based open-world RPG with no hero character, where any recruit can starve, lose limbs, train skills by doing, be enslaved, or found an outpost among reactive factions.
Kerbal Space Program
A space flight sim where the player assembles rockets from parts and flies them under patched-conic orbital physics and atmospheric aerodynamics through a scaled-down planetary system.
Kingdoms and Castles
A medieval town builder in which peasants farm and stockpile for an annual winter while the player stacks castle blocks into walls and towers to defend against vikings, dragons, and ogres.
Lemonade Stand
A 1973 educational business sim in which the player runs a lemonade stand for 12 days, setting glasses made, advertising signs, and price against a daily weather report.
Little Computer People
A 1985 home-computer life sim in which one procedurally seeded little person lives in a cross-section of a three-story house, follows a daily routine, and depends on the player for food, water, and attention.
M.U.L.E.
A four-player economic strategy game on a colony planet where players outfit M.U.L.E. robots to produce food, energy, smithore, and crystite and trade them in real-time auctions.
Manor Lords
An early-access medieval city builder in which families settle gridless burgage plots along curved roads, fields depend on soil fertility and crop rotation, and the lord fields retinue and militia in real-time battles.
Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020)
A flight sim that streams a photorealistic model of the whole Earth built from map and photogrammetry data and flies aircraft through live weather with a surface-level aerodynamic model.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
The successor to Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) that adds a career mode of certified aviation jobs, walk-around preflight, revised aircraft systems, and modeled ground surfaces to the streamed whole-Earth flight sim.
Mindustry
An open-source automation tower defense game in which the player belts ore into factories that supply turrets, units, and the core against enemy waves while capturing campaign sectors on two planets, with an assembly-like logic language for controlling blocks and units.
Minecraft
A procedurally generated voxel sandbox where players mine blocks, craft tools, survive hostile night mobs and hunger, farm and trade, and build circuits from redstone.
Mini Metro
A minimalist subway-design game where the player draws and redraws lines between shape-coded stations under a weekly ration of trains and tunnels until a station overcrowds.
Motorsport Manager
A racing team management game in which the player designs car parts across seasons, hires drivers and staff, and makes live strategy calls on tyres, pit stops, and weather while races are simulated.
Nintendogs
A Nintendo DS puppy sim in which the player pets, washes, feeds, and walks up to three dogs, teaches them tricks with recorded voice commands, and enters disc, agility, and obedience trials.
Noita
A roguelite action game in which every pixel of the world is simulated as a falling-sand material that burns, melts, flows, and reacts, and the player builds wands from spells to dig through procedurally generated levels.
Offworld Trading Company
A real-time economic strategy game on Mars where companies claim resource tiles, refine goods for a shared market whose prices move with every trade, and win by buying out every rival's stock.
Opus Magnum
A programming puzzle game in which the player builds alchemical machines from arms, tracks, and glyphs on a hex grid, programs them on an instruction timeline, and compares each looping solution's cost, cycles, and area against other players' histograms.
Out of the Park Baseball
A text-based baseball management sim in which the player runs a franchise's roster, scouting, draft, trades, and finances while a pitch-by-pitch engine simulates games for career, historical, or fictional leagues.
Oxygen Not Included
A side-view colony sim in which a few duplicants survive inside an asteroid where every tile holds an element with mass and temperature, so air, liquids, heat, and germs flow through the base.
Papers, Please
A border inspection game in which the player checks entrants' documents against daily-changing rules on a timed shift and spends the wages on a family's rent, food, and heat.
Paralives
An indie life sim, in early access since May 2026, in which players build grid-less homes and guide Parafolks with needs, emotions, traits, skills, and careers in an open-world town.
PC Building Simulator
A workshop sim in which the player takes email jobs to build, upgrade, repair, and overclock PCs from licensed parts and verifies the results with benchmark software.
Pharaoh
An Egyptian city builder on the Caesar III engine in which a yearly Nile flood waters floodplain farms, walkers carry services to housing, five gods must be appeased, and monuments take years of labor and materials.
Plague Inc.
A strategy game in which the player evolves a pathogen's transmission, symptoms, and abilities to infect and kill the world's population before humanity's cure research finishes.
Planet Coaster
A 3D theme park builder with a spline and piece coaster editor, modular scenery, and individually simulated guests and staff, built around sharing creations through the Steam Workshop.
Planet Zoo
A zoo management game where the player builds habitats to meet each species' welfare needs, manages genetics and breeding, and raises a conservation rating, using Planet Coaster's building tools.
Pocket City
A premium mobile city builder in which the mayor zones residential, commercial, and industrial land along roads that also carry power and water, and earns experience levels that unlock buildings.
Poly Bridge
A bridge-building puzzle game where the player places beams and roads from materials with different costs and strengths under a budget, then runs a physics test as vehicles cross.
Populous
The first god game, in which the player raises and lowers land so followers can build and multiply, then spends the mana they generate on disasters against a rival deity's people.
PowerWash Simulator
A first-person cleaning sim in which the player power-washes vehicles and buildings, choosing nozzles and soaps to strip dirt layers until every part reports clean.
Princess Maker 2
A raising sim in which the player, as a father figure, schedules a daughter's training, part-time jobs, rest, and adventures from age 10 to 18, and her accumulated attributes decide one of 74 endings.
Prison Architect
A prison management sim in which the player builds a facility, sets an hourly regime, and staffs it while hundreds of prisoners pursue needs whose neglect leads to fights, escapes, and riots.
Project Hospital
A hospital management sim in which the player builds departments and hires staff while doctors diagnose patients by ordering examinations that reveal symptoms until one diagnosis remains.
Project Sid
An Altera research demonstration that runs 10 to 1,000-plus language-model agents with the concurrent PIANO architecture in Minecraft to study role specialization, collective rule-making, and cultural transmission.
Project Zomboid
An isometric zombie survival sandbox in which one survivor manages moodles, injuries, skills, and failing utilities across a large Kentucky map until an inevitable death.
Prom Week
A 2012 browser social sim in which the player picks social exchanges among 18 high school students in the week before prom, with the Comme il Faut rule system deciding who wants to do what and how targets respond.
Railroad Tycoon
A railroad business sim in which the player lays track, builds stations, schedules trains to meet regional supply and demand, and battles rival barons through the stock market.
Rebel Inc.
A counterinsurgency strategy game in which the player, as a coalition governor, spends a monthly budget on civilian and military initiatives to build popular support and stabilize regions of a war-torn country while corruption, inflation, and an insurgency push back.
Reigns
A swipe-based card game in which the player, as a succession of medieval monarchs, accepts or rejects advisers' requests that push church, people, army, and treasury meters, and each reign ends when any meter empties or fills.
RimWorld
A colony sim where a few named colonists with needs, traits, injuries, and relationships survive on a frontier planet while a storyteller AI paces events.
RollerCoaster Tycoon
An amusement park management game in which the player builds rides and custom coasters piece by piece, rated for excitement, intensity, and nausea, to satisfy guests with individual preferences and meet scenario goals.
Satisfactory
A first-person 3D factory automation game in which a pioneer taps infinite resource nodes on an alien planet and connects machines with belts, pipes, trains, and drones to deliver project parts to FICSIT's Space Elevator.
Schedule I
A first-person crime business sim in which the player grows and cooks drugs, mixes ingredients to create products with effects customers want, sells them around a city under police pressure, and automates production with hired staff.
Screeps
A persistent MMO strategy game in which players control colonies only by writing JavaScript that the server runs every tick, directing creeps assembled from body parts to harvest energy, upgrade room controllers, trade, and fight other players' code under a CPU budget.
Seaman
A Dreamcast virtual pet in which the player talks through a microphone to a sardonic human-faced fish, managing its tank's heat, water, and food while it matures through five life stages.
Second Life
A persistent 3D virtual world in which residents build objects from prims and meshes, script them in the Linden Scripting Language, own land in server-simulated regions, and trade goods and land for Linden Dollars exchangeable for real currency.
shapez 2
A combat-free factory automation game in which the player builds multi-level factories on space platforms that cut, rotate, stack, and paint layered geometric shapes and deliver them to a central Vortex to meet escalating milestone and operator goals.
Sid Meier's Civilization
A turn-based 4X game in which the player guides a civilization from 4000 BC toward the space age by founding cities, researching a technology tree, building one-per-world wonders, and competing with rival civilizations by diplomacy or war.
Silent Hunter III
A World War II U-boat sim with a dynamic campaign that generates convoys and escorts, manual torpedo targeting, and a persistent crew that gains rank, experience, and morale across patrols.
SimAnt
A Maxis ant-colony simulation in which the player controls one yellow ant that lays trails and recruits nestmates while managing a black colony's castes against a rival red colony, predators, and the household.
SimCity
The city builder in which a mayor zones residential, commercial, and industrial land, lays power and roads, and sets taxes while grid maps of land value, crime, pollution, and traffic drive where the city grows.
SimCity (2013)
A SimCity reboot built on the agent-based GlassBox engine, in which agents carry workers, power, water, and goods between buildings and small cities share a region over an always-online connection.
SimCity 2000
The isometric sequel to SimCity that adds terrain elevation, an underground layer of water pipes and subways, separate zone tax rates, bonds, ordinances, and power plants that age out.
SimCity 4
A city builder in which several cities share a region map and trade utilities, while zones develop by density and wealth level and a commute model routes trips across roads and transit.
SimEarth
A planetary god game built on James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis in which geology, atmosphere, climate, life, and civilization models interact over billions of years under the player's parameter changes and interventions.
SimLife
A Maxis artificial-life toy in which the player edits plant and animal genes, landscape, and the world's physical parameters, then watches food chains and evolution play out.
SimTower
A skyscraper management game in which the player stacks offices, condos, hotels, and shops and designs elevator service so tenants on daily routines do not wait long enough to stress out and leave.
SnowRunner
An off-road trucking sim in which the player hauls cargo across mud, snow, and water whose surfaces deform under each truck's weight and tires, upgrading a fleet to reach harder terrain.
Songs of Syx
A low-fantasy city builder in which tens of thousands of individually simulated citizens and slaves of several races live in a growing city-state whose armies of up to 50,000 units fight real-time battles.
Space Engineers
A voxel sandbox where players mine asteroids and planets and build ships and stations block by block, with every block carrying mass, inertia, power needs, and damage under Newtonian physics.
Space Haven
A spaceship colony sim in which the player builds a ship tile by tile and keeps a crew with needs, moods, and relationships alive inside a tile-based simulation of oxygen, CO2, heat, and power.
SpaceChem
A programming puzzle game in which the player lays out instruction paths for two waldos in grid reactors that grab, bond, rotate, and split atoms into target molecules, with each solution scored on cycles, reactors, and instructions against global histograms.
Species: Artificial Life, Real Evolution
A solo-developed evolution simulator in which creatures defined by numeric genes mutate, breed, and speciate in real time across a 3D world while the player observes, edits the gene pool, and alters climate.
Spore
A five-stage game in which the player guides a species from cell to galactic empire, building its body, vehicles, and buildings in part-based editors whose creations are shared automatically through the Sporepedia.
Stardew Valley
A farming and life sim in which the player restores an inherited farm over four 28-day seasons, splitting a daily energy budget among crops, animals, mining, fishing, and friendships with Pelican Town's residents.
Stationeers
A first-person space station survival game whose core is an atmospheric simulation of gas mixtures, pressure, temperature, and combustion that the player must engineer with pipes, power, and programmable logic.
Stellaris
A real-time-with-pause space 4X and grand strategy game in which the player designs a species and empire, expands across a procedurally generated hyperlane galaxy from 2200, manages pops, jobs, ethics-based factions, and research card draws, and faces late-game crises.
Subnautica
An underwater survival game on an ocean planet where the player manages oxygen, food, and water while crafting tools, submersibles, and bases to explore deeper and escape.
Suck Up!
A voice-controlled comedy game in which the player, as a disguised vampire, talks AI-driven townspeople into letting them inside, with each resident's replies generated by a language model from its personality and the player's words.
Surgeon Simulator
A physics comedy surgery game in which the player controls one hand with separate finger keys to perform transplants on the patient Bob before his vital signs fail.
Surviving Mars
A Mars colony city builder in which drones build power, water, and oxygen networks before colonists with traits arrive in domes, while research, Earth sponsors, and dust storms, meteors, and cold waves shape survival.
Suzerain
A text-based political narrative game in which the player, as newly elected President Anton Rayne of Sordland, makes dialogue and policy choices across one term that shift the budget, foreign alignment, and constitutional reform toward one of several endings.
Tamagotchi
A 1996 keychain virtual pet whose hunger, happiness, and training meters run on a real-time clock, and whose care quality determines which adult form it grows into and how long it lives.
Teardown
A heist and destruction game set in fully destructible voxel levels where the player plans a route by cutting, smashing, and driving through structures, then races a 60-second alarm timer to grab the targets.
Terra Nil
A reverse city builder in which the player places machines to clean toxic soil, restore water, and grow biomes on a barren map, then recycles every building and leaves.
The Farmer Was Replaced
A programming game in which the player writes Python-like code for a farming drone on a grid farm, where every operation costs simulated ticks, and harvests crops to buy unlocks for language features, farm size, more drones, and new crops.
The Incredible Machine
A Rube Goldberg puzzle game in which the player places supplied parts such as balls, ropes, pulleys, belts, and animals into a level so that a deterministic physics run completes a simple goal.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
An open-world action adventure whose physics and chemistry engines let fire, wind, electricity, temperature, and material properties combine, so puzzles and fights accept solutions the designers did not script.
The Long Dark
A first-person wilderness survival sim set in frozen northern Canada where the player manages warmth, calories, thirst, fatigue, and afflictions against cold, weather, and wildlife.
The Oregon Trail
An educational turn-based travel sim in which the player buys supplies and sets rations for a wagon journey to Oregon while random events, weather, and illness threaten the party.
The Powder Toy
An open-source falling-sand sandbox where hundreds of elements interact cell by cell under simulated air pressure, heat, gravity, and electricity.
The Sims
A life sim in which the player builds a house and guides a household of Sims whose decaying motives, personalities, careers, and relationships produce an open-ended domestic story.
The Sims 2
The 3D sequel to The Sims that adds aging through seven life stages, genetic inheritance, aspirations with wants and fears, and memories, so households play across generations.
The Sims 3
The third mainline Sims game, which places households in a seamless open neighborhood where unplayed Sims keep living, and replaces personality sliders with up to five traits and mood with stacked moodlets.
The Sims 4
The fourth mainline Sims game, built around a dominant emotion computed from moodlets, three-trait personalities with aspiration rewards, multitasking, room-based building, and an in-game Gallery for sharing creations.
Theme Hospital
A hospital management game where the player builds rooms, hires and trains staff, and routes patients with comic diseases through diagnosis and treatment to meet level goals.
Theme Park
A theme park management game in which the player builds rides and shops, tunes prices and recipes for individually simulated visitors, and sells parks to expand worldwide.
This War of Mine
A survival sim about civilians in a besieged city who maintain a shelter by day, scavenge by night, and face moral choices that change their mood until a randomized ceasefire.
Timberborn
A city builder for beaver colonies in which simulated water flows over terrain, recurring droughts and toxic badtides cut or poison it, and players dam, channel, and store water while building upward.
Tiny Glade
A medieval building sandbox in which drawn walls, paths, and building outlines are assembled by procedural rules into detailed castles and cottages, with no goals, management, or failure states.
Tomodachi Life
A Nintendo 3DS life sim in which player-made Mii characters live in an island apartment building, form friendships, quarrels, and romances on their own, and ask the player to solve their problems.
Townscaper
A town-building toy in which clicking colored blocks onto an irregular grid lets a wave function collapse solver assemble houses, arches, stairways, bridges, and gardens, with no goals or resources.
Transport Tycoon
A transport business sim in which the player builds road, rail, sea, and air networks between towns and industries over a century, earning by delivery speed and distance while vehicles age and break down.
Tropico 6
A political city builder in which El Presidente develops an island archipelago across four eras while individually simulated citizens' happiness and faction loyalties decide elections, protests, and revolts.
Two Point Hospital
A hospital management game and spiritual successor to Theme Hospital in which the player builds rooms, trains staff with traits and qualifications, and cures comic illnesses across a chain of hospitals.
Ultima Online
A persistent fantasy MMO in which players progress through skills without classes or levels, craft goods for a player-driven economy, own persistent houses, and could attack each other anywhere until the 2000 split into Trammel and Felucca.
Universe Sandbox
A space physics sandbox where the player builds and alters star systems and watches Newtonian n-body gravity, collisions, and simplified planetary climate play out at adjustable speed.
Utopia
A two-player Intellivision strategy game in which rival island rulers spend gold on buildings and boats in timed rounds, scoring points for how well their populations are housed, fed, and kept content.
Valheim
A co-op Viking survival game in a seeded procedural world of biomes where players gather, build structurally supported shelters, eat for stat buffs, and defeat biome bosses to progress.
Versu
A 2013 iPad interactive story platform from Linden Lab in which the player controls one character among autonomous agents who choose actions by simulating their outcomes against hundreds of desires within authored social practices.
Victoria 3
An economic grand strategy game set from 1836 to 1936 in which the player industrializes a nation by building production chains, passing laws through interest-group politics, and pursuing diplomatic plays while population strata respond through wages, needs, and radicalism.
Viva Piñata
A garden sim in which the player shapes terrain, plants, and water to attract 60 piñata species, then meets each species' requirements to make them residents, breed them, and manage the predators among them.
Where Winds Meet
An open-world martial-arts RPG whose NPCs answer free-text and voice chat through a live language model, included as an early large-audience deployment of runtime LLM characters.
Whispers from the Star
A voice-driven sci-fi narrative game in which the player helps stranded astronaut Stella survive on the planet Gaia through open-ended spoken or typed conversation answered by an AI-generated, voiced performance.
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic
A planned-economy city builder in which every building, commodity, and citizen moves through explicit logistics, from construction materials delivered by truck to exports at border customs for rubles or dollars.
X-Plane
A flight sim whose flight model computes forces on small elements of each wing, control surface, and propeller from aircraft geometry, used for entertainment and in FAA-approved training devices.
Zoo Tycoon
A zoo management game in which the player builds exhibits whose terrain, foliage, shelters, and toys must suit each species, balancing animal happiness against guest happiness and income.
mechanics · 199
Adaptive threat scaling
Threat intensity is computed from a measure of the player's strength, such as wealth, population, time survived, or recent performance.
Adjacency scoring
A placement's value is computed from a table of bonuses and penalties for the placements around it.
Advertising and awareness
Spending on advertising raises a demand or awareness stock that decays without upkeep and scales how many customers arrive or buy.
Advisors
In-world advisor characters monitor simulation indicators, summarize problems, and recommend actions.
Agent inspection
Selecting an agent opens a panel that reveals its needs, mood contributors, current job, and the reasons behind its behavior.
Agent pathfinding
Agents compute routes through space using movement costs, and the routes they choose shape congestion, travel time, and access.
Agent skills
Agents gain skill through practice or training, and skill sets work speed, quality, and access to tasks.
Alerts feed
A notification layer surfaces discrete events and threshold crossings with severity and a link to their location.
Animal husbandry
Domestic animals are housed, fed, tended, and bred, and they yield products whose quantity and quality depend on their care.
Aspirations and wants
An agent's long-term aspiration and current state generate short-horizon wants, and sometimes fears, whose fulfillment pays into a reward meter or currency.
Asynchronous shared regions
Separate players' simulations affect each other asynchronously through shared regions, visits, or exchanges of goods and services.
Attribute-driven match engine
Contest outcomes are simulated play by play from participant attributes, tactics, and randomness instead of being played directly.
Auctions
Goods, land, or rights are allocated by bidding procedures in which players or agents compete on price under rules for timing, ties, and reserves.
Autonomy levels
The degree to which agents act on their own is adjustable, from full free will to explicit commands only.
Blueprints
Player-made layouts can be saved, stamped as build orders, copied, and shared as text or files.
Board confidence
An evaluator such as a board, owner, or chairman sets expectations, updates a confidence stock from results against them, and fires the player below a threshold.
Building placement
The player places discrete structures on a grid or freely, and placement constraints turn layout into a spatial puzzle.
Byproducts and waste
Production emits secondary outputs such as sludge, garbage, heat, or spent fuel that must be handled or they impair the system.
Care-dependent development
A creature's or character's accumulated care or attribute history selects which form or outcome it develops into at each stage boundary, from a fixed branching table.
Career ladder
Characters advance through ranked job levels by meeting skill, relationship, and performance requirements.
Causal breakdown tooltips
Hovering a derived value shows the named modifiers that produce it, and terms inside the tooltip can be hovered in turn.
Citizen satisfaction
An aggregate satisfaction score computed from services, conditions, and events modulates growth, productivity, and unrest.
Collection goals
Catalogs of items, species, or bundles give the player sets to complete for rewards or recognition.
Combination discovery
The player combines owned elements to discover the products of a hidden recipe graph, and finding recipes is itself the goal.
Comparative histograms
A player's solution is plotted against distributions of other players' scores on several metrics.
Contagion
Disease spreads between agents or regions via contact rates and moves hosts through compartments such as susceptible, infected, and recovered.
Content sharing
Player creations such as buildings, creatures, or blueprints are uploaded, browsed, rated, and imported into other players' games.
Contracts and orders
Discrete jobs with requirements, deadlines, and payouts, such as deliveries or commissions, drive income and planning.
Conveyor transport
Items move continuously on belts or lanes with throughput limits, splitters, merges, and priorities.
Corruption leakage
A corruption level driven by spending, administrative reach, or size removes a share of revenue or output until countermeasures bring it down.
Creature care
The player directly feeds, cleans, and plays with a creature whose needs decay; neglect causes sickness, stunted growth, or death.
Creature learning
A creature's behavior is learned from player reward and punishment or from neural adaptation over its life.
Crime and policing
Crime levels arise from local conditions such as land value, density, or unemployment, and police coverage, prisons, and justice reduce them.
Crisis countdown
A known future crisis such as a storm, winter, cure, or deadline is announced in advance, and the remaining time structures preparation.
Crop cultivation
Planted crops progress through growth stages over days or seasons depending on water, soil, and season, then are harvested.
Crowd preferences
Large visitor populations with individual preferences, budgets, and tolerances choose attractions and react with visible thoughts.
Culture and religion conversion
Provinces or population groups carry culture and faith identities that drift or are converted by missionaries, policies, and rulers, changing unrest, opinion, and bonuses.
Customer value choice
Customers choose among offerings by comparing price to perceived value and personal preference.
Daily action budget
A per-day pool of energy, stamina, or time slots limits how many actions the player can take, and the day's end resets it and forces prioritization.
Daily schedules
Agents follow time-blocked routines for work, sleep, and leisure that create rhythms of demand across the day.
Data overlays
Map layers visualize hidden variables such as land value, pollution, coverage, or traffic.
Dated technology timeline
New vehicle models, platforms, or products enter and leave availability on a calendar tied to in-game dates rather than to research, forcing fleet or platform renewal.
Day-night cycle
A diurnal cycle changes light, visibility, temperature, and which agents are active, so activity follows the hour of the day.
Decoration and beauty
Decorative objects and scenery carry beauty values that are aggregated over tiles, rooms, or radii and feed agent mood or ratings.
Delegation to AI managers
Subsystems are handed to AI managers or governors that pursue player-set goals within bounds.
Delivery-time payment
Payment for a delivery depends on cargo type, quantity, distance, and transit time, with each cargo losing value at its own rate the longer it travels.
Deposit depletion
Extractable deposits hold finite quantities and run out, forcing expansion, relocation, or substitution.
Design performance rating
Player-built designs are run or analyzed and scored on simulated metrics such as ride excitement, bridge stress, or cost and cycles.
Designation orders
The player marks tiles or objects for work such as dig, chop, or build, and autonomous agents claim and execute the jobs.
Diagnose and repair
The player inspects a machine, finds faulty parts with tools and tests, disassembles in order to reach them, and repairs or replaces them.
Diagnosis and treatment
Patients present symptoms, examinations reduce uncertainty about a hidden condition, and the correct treatment cures it while wrong or late treatment harms.
Dilemma cards
Discrete choice events present a situation with a few options that each shift meters, values, or flags in tradeoff.
Direct avatar control
The player directly controls one embodied character's movement and actions in the simulated world.
Dynasty succession
When the player character dies, play continues as an heir chosen by inheritance rules.
Education and workforce
Education levels gate job types, and schooling converts the labor pool into higher levels over time.
Elections
Periodic votes by simulated or real voters determine tenure or policy.
Embodied skill control
Real-time motor skill operating a simulated mechanism, such as hand-flying, driving, or surgery, is the main challenge.
Equity and buyouts
Companies issue shares whose price tracks performance, and players buy them for profit or accumulate a majority to take control of rivals.
Execution budget
Player-written programs are metered against a simulated compute budget, such as CPU per tick, tick cost per operation, instruction slots, or RAM, which makes efficiency the scarce resource.
Faction diplomacy
Factions hold relations with each other, and treaties, alliances, and wars follow from interests and opinion.
Falling-sand materials
Every pixel or cell holds a material whose class rule makes it fall, flow, or rise by swapping with neighbors, with reactions layered on top.
Fire spread
Fire ignites and spreads across flammable cells or objects at rates set by fuel, wind, and moisture, consuming what it burns.
Flight aerodynamics
Lift, drag, thrust, and control-surface forces computed from airspeed and attitude govern aircraft motion.
Fluid and gas simulation
Liquids and gases stored per cell or as fields flow, mix, and pressurize across space according to pressure and density differences.
Fluid pipe networks
Fluids such as water, oil, sewage, or gas flow through pipes with pressure or throughput limits between producers and consumers.
Fog of war
Parts of the world stay hidden or stale until observed by the player's units, structures, or sensors.
Food web
Species eat and are eaten along a feeding graph, so populations rise, crash, and oscillate under predator-prey dynamics.
Forecasting
The interface projects future states such as resource runway, budget balance, or upcoming weather.
Generative content on demand
A generative model creates new content such as text, items, recipes, or rules at runtime in response to player input.
God powers
The player spends a power resource on miracles that alter terrain, weather, or creatures.
Goods consumption
A population consumes goods at per-capita rates; unmet consumption lowers satisfaction or blocks advancement.
Gossip propagation
Information about events spreads through social contacts, changing what agents know and believe.
Habitat suitability
Species or crops thrive only where conditions such as terrain, temperature, water, and cover match their needs, scored per location.
Hand crafting
The player or avatar combines carried components into items from a recipe list, gated by workstations and known recipes.
Hauling jobs
Agents pick up and carry items between locations via a job queue, making hauling capacity a hidden throughput constraint.
Heat transfer
Temperature diffuses between cells, materials, and objects by conductivity and heat capacity, and thresholds trigger phase changes and damage.
History chronicle
The game records significant simulation events into a structured history that players can browse and other systems can reference.
Hydrology
Water flows across terrain and through rivers by height differences, producing floods, droughts, irrigation, and dam management.
Immigration by attractiveness
Population arrives or leaves based on attractiveness such as jobs, housing, and happiness relative to alternatives.
Injury body model
Bodies are hierarchies of parts with their own damage, and wounds, bleeding, infection, and prosthetics change capacities such as moving and manipulation.
Interest groups
Factions within a polity have clout and preferences over policies, and their approval gates what the player can do.
Labor market
Workers fill jobs by type and education; mismatches create unemployment or labor shortages that throttle production.
Land value
Each location's value is computed from nearby amenities, nuisances, and access, and it drives density and building upgrades.
Lifecycle and aging
Agents are born, age through life stages with different capabilities, and die.
Loans and debt
Capital can be borrowed at interest with repayment schedules, so leverage accelerates both growth and failure.
Loss on death
When a character or ship is destroyed, its carried or fitted assets are lost or dropped at the death site for the owner or others to recover, with insurance or retrieval rules as softeners.
Machine boosting
Per-machine modifiers such as modules, beacons, clock speed, or coatings trade extra power, scarce items, or currency for faster or more productive machines.
Material interactions
A rule table defines how elements such as fire, water, and electricity change materials and each other on contact.
Megaproject sink
A terminal construction absorbs very large quantities of produced goods in staged phases and serves as the long-run goal and output sink of a production game.
Memories and thoughts
Events create itemized, time-limited mood modifiers or lasting memories that shape later behavior.
Milestone unlocks
Reaching thresholds such as population, output, or score unlocks new buildings, areas, or features.
Military operations
Units with modeled sensors, weapons, platforms, and doctrine conduct operations at operational fidelity, mostly under player orders and automated behavior.
Modding API
Hooks for scripts and data definitions, official or through a de facto loader most modders use, let players change and extend the simulation's content and rules.
Modular assembly
The player builds machines, vehicles, or creatures from parts whose stats and physical arrangement determine how the result behaves.
Mood and breakdowns
Mood aggregates needs, memories, and environment, and crossing thresholds triggers mental breaks or inspired performance.
Natural selection
Differential survival and reproduction by fitness shifts trait distributions across generations.
Natural-language interaction
The player communicates with characters by free text or voice, and the system interprets intent and responds.
Needs decay
Each agent has needs such as hunger, energy, social, and fun that decay over time and are restored by actions.
Negotiation
The player and an AI party exchange offers and counteroffers over wages, prices, or contract terms against the AI's hidden reservation value until a deal is struck or talks fail.
Off-screen life progression
Households or agents outside the player's active simulation advance through life events on a cheap stochastic model, so the world changes between visits.
Opinion modifiers
Opinions are sums of named, decaying modifiers from events and traits, itemized for the player.
Orbital mechanics
Bodies move under gravity, and maneuvers spend delta-v to change orbits, intercepts, and transfers.
Pause and speed control
The player pauses the simulation and switches between speed multipliers, trading attention against elapsed game time.
Periodic ticks
Some state changes, such as budgets, harvests, or growth, resolve in batches at fixed intervals like a month or a year rather than continuously.
Permadeath
Death of agents or the avatar is permanent, and the save system prevents undoing it.
Persistent shared world
A server-side world keeps running and keeps its state for many players, whether or not any one player is logged in.
Personality traits
Fixed or slow-changing traits change each agent's needs, preferences, and available actions.
Planetary climate
Planet-scale variables such as atmospheric composition, temperature, sea level, and biosphere evolve under coupled feedbacks and can be deliberately altered.
Player legislation
Players author, propose, and vote on rules that the game then enforces inside a shared world, such as taxes, bans, and permits.
Player organizations
Players form corporations, guilds, or governments with membership, roles, permissions, and shared assets.
Player programming
The player writes code in a language the game executes to control units, machines, or the world.
Player-driven markets
Players post buy and sell orders in shared order books, and prices emerge from player behavior.
Policy influence network
Policies, indicators, and voter groups connect through a weighted causal graph with delays.
Policy toggles
Enactable laws or policies change simulation rules with explicit tradeoffs.
Political capital
An abstract governing currency accrues each period from leaders, factions, or population welfare and is spent on policy changes, edicts, and other state actions.
Pollution spread
Pollution emitted by sources accumulates and diffuses across land, water, or air cells and harms health, land value, or growth, or provokes threats.
Population strata
The population is divided into classes or tiers with distinct needs, roles, and upgrade paths.
Power allocation
The player splits a fixed power budget among a vehicle's subsystems in real time, trading shields, weapons, engines, and life support against each other.
Power grid
Generators produce energy that is distributed over a connected network to consumers; shortfalls cause brownouts or shutdowns.
Procedural build assist
Coarse player input such as a block or a drawn wall is turned into detailed, organic structures by procedural rules.
Procedural characters
Characters are generated with names, backstories, traits, skills, and appearance sampled from constrained tables or grammars.
Procedural checklists
Operating simulated equipment requires performing ordered steps on modeled controls that mirror real procedures, with system states gating each step.
Procedural terrain
Maps are generated from a seed through noise, erosion, climate, and placement rules.
Product development
The player configures a product's features, and a simulated market scores it against trends, quality, and competition.
Production chains
Buildings or machines convert input goods into output goods via fixed recipes and cycle times, forming multi-step dependency trees.
Programming by demonstration
An agent or vehicle learns a routine by recording the player performing it, and the recording becomes a replayable, sometimes editable, program.
Projectile ballistics
Shots are simulated as projectiles in flight with velocity, gravity, drag, and penetration, so range, angle, and lead decide hits rather than an instant trace or a dice roll.
Public transit lines
Player-drawn lines with stops and vehicles carry passengers whose ridership depends on coverage, frequency, and transfers.
PvP security zones
A shared world is divided into zones whose rules set whether players may attack each other and what an aggressor pays, such as NPC police response or lost standing.
Quality tiers
Produced items carry quality grades derived from inputs, worker skill, or chance, scaling their value or effect.
Raid defense
Settlements defend against periodic attacks with walls, turrets, traps, and fighters placed and commanded by the player.
Rail signaling
Block and path signals partition track so trains can share it without collision; throughput depends on signal design.
Random disasters
Stochastic disasters such as fires, floods, earthquakes, storms, or meteors strike at random times and places and damage the system.
RCI demand
A demand signal for residential, commercial, and industrial land derived from the balance of jobs, workers, and goods.
Real-time clock
Game time follows the real-world clock and calendar, so the world advances, ages, and holds events while the game is closed.
Real-world data feeds
Simulation state is initialized or driven at runtime by external real-world data such as map imagery, elevation, star catalogs, live weather, or live traffic instead of authored or procedural content.
Relationship values
Pairwise numeric affinity between characters changes with interactions and drives social choices.
Renewable regrowth
Harvested stocks such as forests, fish, game, and soil regenerate over time at density-dependent rates, allowing sustainable yield or overexploitation.
Reputation
A standing value with a faction or the public changes access, prices, and how others respond.
Request-provider logistics
Containers declare per-item requests and supplies, and a dispatcher sends drones or robots from providers to requesters without fixed routes.
Resource extraction
Workers or machines harvest raw materials from map nodes (ore, trees, fish, oil) at rates set by tools, labor, and node richness.
Rigid-body physics
Objects with mass and inertia move under forces and collide, constrained by contacts and joints solved each step.
Rival firms
AI or player competitors contest markets, prices, and assets; market share decides who wins.
Road networks
Roads and paths define connectivity; buildings must connect to function, and travel cost depends on network geometry.
Romance and family
Agents court, partner, marry, and form families according to compatibility and relationship state.
Room recognition
Enclosed spaces are detected by flood fill and classified into room types by their size and contents, and the type grants effects.
Rule-checking inspection
The player checks documents, people, or cargo against a rulebook that changes over time, under time pressure, with penalties for errors.
Scenario objectives
Preset maps or situations come with explicit goals, constraints, and often a deadline.
Scouting knowledge
Entity attributes are known only with uncertainty that scouting effort reduces.
Seasonal world reset
A shared world runs for a bounded season and is then wiped and restarted, often with rule changes carried into the next season.
Seasons
A seasonal calendar cycles conditions such as temperature, daylight, and growing windows that govern growth, demand, and risk.
Service coverage
Service buildings such as police, fire, clinics, and schools satisfy demand within a radius or network distance, up to a capacity.
Service queues
Agents wait in lines for limited-capacity services; waiting time feeds back into satisfaction and throughput.
Signal circuits
In-world wires, sensors, and logic elements carry signals that read machine state and control machines.
Simulated history generation
World generation simulates years to centuries of civilizations, figures, and events before play begins, producing the starting world.
Smart objects
Objects advertise the need satisfaction they offer, and agents query nearby objects to decide what to do.
Social exchanges
Discrete social moves such as flirt, insult, or apologize have preconditions on social state and norms, and they update relationships.
Soft-body deformation
Objects built from mass nodes and spring beams bend, crumple, and break under stress, and deformation persists.
Spoilage
Perishable goods lose value or rot over time depending on storage conditions such as temperature and containers.
Stability and unrest
Grievances accumulate into unrest that triggers protests, strikes, or revolt.
Staff hiring and rosters
The player hires individual staff with skills, traits, and wages to operate a facility or team.
Statistical combat resolution
Battles between units resolve from attack, defense, morale, terrain, and random rolls in rounds rather than from physics or modeled sensors and weapons.
Stats dashboards
Graphs and tables show the recorded history of simulation variables over selectable time windows.
Stimulus attraction
Player actions emit sound or light stimuli with a radius and decay, and agents that perceive them move toward the source, so managing emissions is part of survival.
Storage and buffers
Goods occupy finite storage; buffers decouple producers from consumers, and full storage blocks production.
Storyteller director
A director AI chooses which events to fire and when, pacing them by a model of tension and the current state.
Stress accumulation
A slow per-agent stress stock integrates negative experiences scaled by personality and, as it crosses levels, triggers breaks or lasting changes.
Structural integrity
Structures carry support values or loads propagated from the ground, and elements that lose support or exceed their limits collapse.
Subsystem damage
A vehicle or ship is a set of named components with their own integrity, and damage to one removes its capacity, such as power, thrust, shields, or sensors, until it is repaired.
Supply lines
Remote units or outposts need a continuous connection to a supply source; cutting the connection causes attrition.
Supply-demand pricing
Prices adjust to supply and demand, so scarcity raises prices and gluts lower them.
Surface work tools
The player applies a tool to surfaces to clean, paint, or strip them, and a per-surface coverage state shows visible progress toward completion.
Survival meters
The avatar's bodily stocks such as hunger, thirst, warmth, and fatigue deplete over time and, if unmanaged, drain health and kill.
Taxation
Player-set tax rates convert economic activity into revenue at the cost of growth, happiness, or competitiveness.
Tech tree
A research or unlock graph gates buildings, recipes, or abilities behind prerequisites and accumulated research.
Terraforming
The player raises, lowers, flattens, or repaints terrain, usually at a cost, to make land usable or to reshape water and paths.
Terrain deformation
Wheels, feet, and impacts displace soft ground such as mud and snow, and the persistent ruts change traction for later passes.
Territorial control
Map regions have an owner and a current controller; occupation flips control in war, and peace, purchase, or integration transfers ownership at a cost in time, unrest, or political currency.
Track laying
The player builds rail or coaster track segment by segment under grade, curvature, terrain, and cost constraints, and vehicles then run on the resulting path.
Trade routes
Goods are exchanged between settlements, regions, or foreign markets along routes with price differences, tariffs, and transit time.
Traffic congestion
Trips route over a capacitated network; volume beyond capacity raises travel time and delays services and deliveries.
Trait inheritance
Offspring inherit traits or genes from their parents with recombination, variation, or mutation.
Travel mode choice
Agents choose among walking, cycling, driving, and transit for each trip by comparing time, money, and comfort costs, which sets how demand splits across networks.
Treasury and budget
A money stock with income and expense flows such as taxes, upkeep, wages, and service funding; a negative balance leads to debt or failure.
Triggered event chains
Authored event templates fire when state conditions hold, and their outcomes schedule follow-up events that chain into multi-step stories.
Turn structure
The simulation advances in discrete turns, each divided into ordered phases in which players decide and the world then resolves.
Unit commands
The player issues direct orders to specific units or agents, overriding their autonomous behavior.
Utility action selection
Agents choose actions by scoring options against needs and context, then picking the highest or sampling among high scores.
Vehicle dynamics
Tire, suspension, drivetrain, and weight-transfer models compute vehicle handling from forces at each wheel.
Vehicle routes and schedules
Vehicles are assigned ordered stops with load and unload rules to move goods or passengers between nodes.
Vertical layers
The world has stacked layers such as z-levels, floors, or underground networks, and rules connect what happens between them.
Villager requests
Characters generate small requests or quests from templates whose parameters are filled from simulation state, with rewards and deadlines.
Voxel destruction
The world is built from small destructible units that can be removed, broken loose, and burned anywhere.
Walker service delivery
Services are delivered by agents walking routes from their building, so coverage depends on where walkers actually go.
War score and peace terms
Each war tracks a score or exhaustion level from battles, occupation, and war goals, and that value caps what a peace settlement can demand or forces capitulation.
Wear and breakdown
Assets lose condition with use and age, breakdown risk rises as condition falls, and maintenance or repair restores it.
Weather
Weather states such as rain, storms, snow, wind, and temperature change over time and modify activities and other systems.
Work priorities
The player sets which agents do which job types in what order, and agents self-assign from that priority table.
Zoning
The player paints land-use zones, and the simulation decides whether and what to build, upgrade, or abandon on each zoned lot.
techniques · 45
3D Gaussian Splatting
Scenes are represented as millions of anisotropic 3D Gaussians optimized from photos and rasterized in real time, giving photoreal captured or generated environments at 1080p and 30+ fps.
Agent-based automated playtesting and balancing
Studios train imitation, reinforcement learning, and search agents to play builds, estimating level difficulty, pass and churn rates, progression pacing, map coverage, and exploits before players reach them.
Automated generation of game rules and mechanics
Systems that write complete game rule sets as code in a description language, using evolution or language models to propose rules and self-play agents to score balance, decisiveness, and strategic depth before a human sees them.
Continuous cellular automata and foundation-model search for artificial life
Continuous cellular automata such as Lenia and mass-conserving Flow-Lenia produce lifelike self-organizing creatures, and ASAL uses vision-language foundation models to search their rule spaces for phenomena described in text or for open-ended novelty.
Deep reinforcement learning policies for NPC opponents and navigation
Neural control policies trained with deep reinforcement learning inside the game's own simulation drive opponents and NPCs, as with Sony AI's Gran Turismo Sophy, a selectable rival in Gran Turismo 7 since 2023.
Differentiable simulation
Simulators written so automatic differentiation returns gradients of an outcome with respect to initial state, controls, or rule parameters, replacing black-box search with gradient descent for tuning and inverse design.
Diffusion and autoregressive neural game engines
Action-conditioned generative models trained on recordings of one existing game predict each next frame from recent frames and player input, so the model itself plays the role of the game engine.
Generalist instructable game agents (SIMA)
Agents that read screen pixels and natural-language instructions and output keyboard and mouse actions across many commercial 3D games, with later versions reasoning, conversing, and improving through self-generated tasks.
Generative agents (memory stream, reflection, planning)
LLM-driven characters that store observations in a natural-language memory stream, retrieve them by recency, importance, and relevance, synthesize reflections, and plan their day top-down.
Genie foundation world models
Google DeepMind's Genie models generate playable worlds from a text or image prompt and render them in real time from player input, with Genie 3 reaching 720p at 24 fps and about a minute of visual memory.
Grammar-constrained decoding for valid game actions
Decoding that masks every token which cannot extend a valid string of a schema, regular expression, or grammar, so a model's output always parses as a legal game action or data record.
Graph network simulators and neural operators
Learned simulators that predict the next state of particles, meshes, or continuous fields with message-passing networks or Fourier-space operators, trained on numerical solver output and run 10-1000x faster than that solver.
Language models grounded in strategic planning for negotiation games
Meta's Cicero couples a dialogue language model with a planning engine that infers other players' intentions from the board and conversation, so its free-text negotiation proposes and follows concrete joint plans, reaching human-level Diplomacy.
Learned kinematic motion synthesis
Neural networks generate or compress kinematic character animation, as in Ubisoft's learned motion matching, EA's HyperMotion, and inZOI's motion extraction from uploaded video.
Learned level and map generation (PCGRL, MarioGPT, LLM generators)
Generators trained by reinforcement learning or on example levels, including small and large language models that emit tile maps from text prompts, produce playable levels and maps without hand-written generation rules.
Learned physics-based character control
Neural policies trained with reinforcement learning drive simulated humanoids by joint torques to imitate motion capture, and MaskedMimic-style controllers accept partial goals such as keyframes, text, or an object to sit on.
LLM explanation of simulation state
Language models that read simulation state, modifier breakdowns, agent traces, or event logs and answer why and what-if questions or summarize what happened for players and designers.
LLM game master and narrative director
A language model that adjudicates player and NPC intentions, decides outcomes, generates events and quests, and narrates them, either free-form or checked against a typed world state and canon.
LLM models of individual human choice
Language models conditioned on interviews or fine-tuned on millions of experimental choices that predict how specific people or populations answer surveys, play economic games, and choose in decision tasks.
LLM-adjudicated state transitions (LLM as game mechanic)
A language model computes the outcome of an interaction (two elements combined, an action on an object) from a text description of the inputs, with results cached so every player sees the same rule.
LLM-guided evolutionary program search
An LLM proposes edits to code, an automated evaluator scores each candidate, and an evolutionary database keeps the best and most diverse programs, finding heuristics and constructions that beat human-designed ones.
LLM-written skill libraries (Voyager)
An LLM agent that proposes its own next task, writes executable code to do it, refines the code from execution errors and self-checks, and stores verified programs in a retrievable skill library.
Machine-learned weather forecasting
Neural networks trained on decades of atmospheric reanalysis forecast global weather 10-15 days ahead in seconds to minutes on one accelerator, matching or beating physics-based operational models on most verification targets.
Many-agent LLM societies
Simulations of hundreds to a million LLM-driven agents with concurrent cognitive modules, shared environments, and message buses that produce role specialization, rule changes, cultural spread, and polarization.
Massively parallel GPU simulation
Simulators that keep thousands of world instances as tensors on a GPU or TPU and step them all in one kernel, raising throughput to millions of steps per second for agent training and Monte Carlo sweeps.
Mean field games and mean-field learning
Mean field game theory replaces an N-player game with one representative agent responding to the population distribution, and recent learning methods compute these equilibria for state spaces of hundreds of billions of states.
ML reconstruction of the planet from aerial imagery
Machine learning classifies buildings, vegetation, and terrain in satellite and aerial imagery and procedural rules rebuild them as 3D scenery, which Microsoft Flight Simulator streams for the whole Earth.
Monte Carlo tree search for game AI
A best-first search that grows a game tree from repeated simulated playouts and picks branches with a bandit rule such as UCT, letting AI players plan from a forward model without a hand-tuned evaluation function.
Muse World and Human Action Model (WHAM)
Microsoft Research's WHAM is a transformer trained on seven years of Bleeding Edge play that generates both future frames and the player's controller actions, aimed at gameplay ideation, with a real-time Quake II follow-up (WHAMM).
Neural cellular automata
Cellular automata whose local update rule is a small learned network or logic circuit, trained so that cells grow, maintain, and regenerate a target pattern, texture, structure, or level from a seed.
Neural rendering in the graphics pipeline
Small neural networks inside the renderer upscale frames, generate extra frames, denoise ray tracing, decode compressed textures and layered materials, and since DLSS 5 re-light the final frame, all without touching simulation state.
On-device small language models for characters
Pruned, distilled, and 4-bit quantized language, speech, and embedding models that run on the player's GPU beside rendering to drive character decisions, dialogue, and voice without per-token server cost.
Open real-time interactive video world models
Open and startup interactive video models (Matrix-Game, Hunyuan-GameCraft, WorldPlay, Yan, Mirage, Odyssey) adapt pretrained video diffusion transformers to keyboard and mouse control and stream frames in real time, adding pose-indexed memory and text edits during play.
Open-ended co-generation of environments and agents
Systems that keep generating new environments or tasks at the edge of an agent's ability and train agents on them, from POET's co-evolved terrains to OMNI-EPIC's foundation-model-written task code and SIMA 2 practicing in Genie 3 worlds.
Physical-world foundation models
Video-pretrained models of physical dynamics, NVIDIA Cosmos for generating action-conditioned training video and Meta's V-JEPA 2 for latent prediction and planning, target robotics and driving rather than games.
Prompt-to-persistent 3D world generation
Models such as World Labs Marble and HunyuanWorld turn text, images, video, or coarse 3D blockouts into persistent explorable scenes exported as Gaussian splats and meshes with collision proxies.
Quality-diversity search (MAP-Elites) for content and balance
Evolutionary search that keeps the best solution found in each cell of a grid of designer-chosen behavior descriptors, returning an archive of diverse high-quality levels, decks, or strategies instead of one optimum.
Real-time generative restyling of game video
A live video-to-video diffusion model repaints each frame of a running game from a text prompt in under 40 ms, leaving the game's own simulation and state untouched.
Realtime speech-to-speech and expressive TTS for characters
Streaming speech recognition, speech-native language models, and context-aware text-to-speech that let characters hold spoken, interruptible conversations with roughly 200-250 ms response onset and generated emotional delivery.
Regret minimization and search for imperfect-information games
Self-play algorithms that minimize counterfactual regret over information sets, refined by real-time subgame search, compute hard-to-exploit strategies that bluff and hide information and beat top humans at poker, Stratego, and Scotland Yard.
Self-play planning with learned models (AlphaZero, MuZero, Dreamer)
Agents that combine tree search or imagined rollouts with neural policy and value networks trained by self-play, where MuZero and Dreamer also learn the environment's dynamics, reach superhuman play from rules or pixels alone.
Simulation-based inference for calibrating simulators
Neural density estimators trained on simulator runs return a posterior over a simulator's parameters given observed data, calibrating agent-based and economic models whose likelihoods cannot be computed.
Subspace neural physics and learned deformers
Small networks trained on offline cloth, flesh, or muscle simulation predict deformation in a compressed subspace or as corrective morph targets, running hundreds to thousands of times faster than the source simulation inside a game engine.
Text- and image-to-3D asset generation
Open 3D generative models (TRELLIS, Hunyuan3D 2.x, Roblox Cube) produce textured meshes from a text prompt or image in seconds to a minute, and inZOI exposes image-to-3D object creation to players.
Wave Function Collapse and constraint-based tile generation
An example-driven constraint solver that fills a grid by repeatedly collapsing the lowest-entropy cell to one tile and propagating adjacency constraints, shipped in games including Townscaper, Bad North, and Caves of Qud.
opportunities · 42
Agent ambassadors between player worlds
Let each player's simulation send language-agent representatives that trade and negotiate with other players' worlds while they are offline.
AI liquidity in player markets
Keep player-driven markets liquid on small servers with model-driven traders whose behavior is calibrated to human trading and constrained by market rules.
Automated mechanic discovery
Search the space of rule programs with language-model-guided evolution and agent playtests to propose new mechanics that are learnable, deep, and unlike existing ones.
Bottleneck explainer for production networks
Explain where and why a production network is starved or blocked by combining sensitivity analysis of the actual simulation with grounded language explanations.
Branch preview of policy futures
Fork the simulation in the background and show the player likely futures of a decision before committing, using parallel or surrogate simulation.
Calibrated serious simulations
Use simulation-based inference and differentiable simulators to calibrate game-grade models of epidemics, traffic, and markets to real data, with published fit metrics.
Content-elastic event systems
Remove the authoring ceiling on event chains, requests, and dilemmas by generating schema-constrained variants from designer templates and validating them against game state.
Drama-aware storyteller
A storyteller that models characters' arcs and relationships, not only threat budgets, choosing authored incidents that create meaningful stakes for specific colonists.
Event-sourced simulation runtime
An engine layer that records simulation and model calls as an append-only event log, giving replay, forking, explanation, and determinism for games with AI components.
Explained delegation to AI managers
Subsystem managers that learn the player's preferences from their past decisions and explain each action, so delegation scales play without hiding it.
Factories with a living workforce
Automation games whose workers age, learn, form families, and retire, so a production network is also a society that must be sustained across generations.
Generated dream and replay views
Use generative world models for non-authoritative views such as memories, rumors, and alternate histories, where drift is acceptable and variety is the point.
Generated inspection shifts
Rule-checking job sims with generated documents, items, and rule changes each shift, verified against an answer key so infinite variety stays fair.
Generated recipe graphs
Generate solvable, non-degenerate, on-theme production recipe graphs and tech trees, verified by agents, to cut content cost for factory and crafting games.
Generative decoration catalogs
Let players generate furniture, scenery, and building pieces from text or sketches within a game's style and technical budgets, removing the cap on creative-mode catalogs.
Human-calibrated customers
Replace hand-tuned customer and crowd preference curves with models that predict human choices, so tycoon markets respond like real populations.
Illustrated chronicles
Turn a run's event log into a readable, illustrated saga that players can share, making emergent stories legible and portable.
Intent-level orders
Players state goals in plain language and the game compiles them into priorities, designations, and schedules, cutting micromanagement in colony and management sims.
Language-agent society terrarium
An observer-gardener genre where players seed and nudge a persistent society of language-model agents and watch institutions, cultures, and histories form.
Learned build assist for cities
Extend Townscaper-style procedural assist to full city builders with learned style priors, so rough strokes become plausible districts the simulation then evaluates.
Learned material surrogates at world scale
Use learned and GPU-parallel physics surrogates to bring per-particle fluids, gases, and destruction from small arenas to large persistent worlds.
Learned motion for simulated crowds
Physics-based learned character controllers let simulated agents move and react physically, so crowds, injuries, and labor look like what the simulation says is happening.
Learned regional weather
Use machine-learned weather emulators to give farming, flight, and city sims realistic, cheap, regionally coherent weather and climate variability.
Local-first AI simulation games
Ship small language and generative models inside the game so AI features run offline with no per-hour inference bill, changing the economics of AI-native simulation.
Mean-field crowds and traffic
Simulate hundreds of thousands of agents with equilibrium-consistent route and choice behavior by combining mean-field approximations with sampled individuals.
Mechanic modding by description
Players describe a rule change in plain language; a model writes the mod against the modding API and automated agents test it before it is shared.
Natural-language legislation
Players write laws in plain language that are compiled into typed policy parameters, while simulated interest groups argue, lobby, and comply.
Negotiating faction AI
Grand strategy rivals that negotiate in language and plan around their promises, combining strategic search with dialogue.
Open-ended evolution sandbox
Evolution games built on continuous artificial-life substrates and automated discovery, where morphology and behavior evolve without designer-authored part catalogs.
Parallel autobalancing of economies
Run thousands of scripted, learned, and diversity-seeking agents through a game's economy at accelerated speed to find degenerate strategies and tune parameters before players do.
Participatory planning sandboxes
City-builder interfaces over calibrated urban models with simulated resident voices, used by communities and planners to explore tradeoffs together.
Placement that tells stories
City builders where where and what the player builds triggers specific, state-aware story events about the inhabitants of those buildings.
Quality-diversity scenario libraries
Generate large libraries of scenarios that cover a grid of difficulty and play style, so scenario-driven sims never run out of distinct challenges.
Research by named scientists
Replace the abstract research meter with named researchers whose skills, relationships, and rivalries determine what gets discovered and when.
Salience-gated language agents
Keep cheap utility scoring for every tick and call a language model only at salient moments, giving colony and life sims believable minds at a bounded cost.
Simulation games as agent benchmarks
Use factory, colony, and economy sims as long-horizon evaluation and training environments for AI agents, with game studios as environment providers.
Simulator instructor coaching
Flight, driving, and procedure sims with a voice instructor that watches inputs and state, explains mistakes, and adapts lessons in real time.
Specification programming games
Programming puzzles where an AI writes the code and the player writes the specification and tests, scored on how precisely the spec pins down correct behavior.
Symbolic simulation, neural rendering
Keep gameplay in a small deterministic symbolic simulation and let a generative world model render it, decoupling visual variety from simulation cost and art budgets.
Teachable sim companion
A co-player agent that learns factory, colony, or farm routines from demonstration and language, and grows a library of reusable skills the player can inspect.
Trainable creatures revival
Revive the Creatures and Black & White lineage with creatures whose behavior is genuinely learned from player feedback and can explain itself.
Why-query over the simulation log
Let players ask why something happened and answer from the simulation's own event log, making deep systemic games legible without simplifying them.
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ECMWF's AI forecasts become operational
ECMWF · 2025-02-25 · ECMWF news
Education
Cities: Skylines Wiki contributors · 2026 · Cities: Skylines Wiki (paradoxwikis.com)
Efficient Guided Generation for Large Language Models
Brandon T. Willard, Rémi Louf · 2023-07-19 · arXiv
Electric system
Factorio Wiki contributors · 2026 · Official Factorio Wiki
Eleven v3 (alpha) announcement
ElevenLabs · 2025-06-03 · ElevenLabs blog
Energy
Stardew Valley Wiki contributors · 2026 · Stardew Valley Wiki
Enhanced POET: Open-Ended Reinforcement Learning through Unbounded Invention of Learning Challenges and their Solutions
Rui Wang, Joel Lehman, Aditya Rawal · 2020-03-19 · arXiv
Euro Truck Simulator 2
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Euro Truck Simulator 2 (Truck Simulator Wiki)
Truck Simulator Wiki contributors · 2026 · Truck Simulator Wiki (wiki.gg)
Europa Universalis IV
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Event modding (Crusader Kings III)
CK3 Wiki contributors · 2026 · Crusader Kings III Wiki (paradoxwikis.com)
Evolutionary Game Design
Cameron Browne, Frederic Maire · 2010-03 · IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 2(1):1-16
Explaining Agent Behavior with Large Language Models
Xijia Zhang, Yue Guo, Simon Stepputtis · 2023-09-19 · arXiv
Factorio Learning Environment
Jack Hopkins, Mart Bakler, Akbir Khan · 2025-03-06 · arXiv
Factorio Lua API documentation
Wube Software · 2026 · lua-api.factorio.com
Fallout Shelter announced for iOS, out now
Sal Romano · 2015-06-14 · Gematsu
Farming Simulator
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Farming Simulator 25 on Steam
GIANTS Software · 2024-11-12 · Steam
Farthest Frontier
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Farthest Frontier on Steam
Crate Entertainment · 2026 · Steam
First city-building videogame
Guinness World Records · 2026 · Guinness World Records
Flow-Lenia: Towards open-ended evolution in cellular automata through mass conservation and parameter localization
Erwan Plantec, Gautier Hamon, Mayalen Etcheverry · 2022-12-14 · ALIFE 2023
Fluctuations in the Abundance of a Species considered Mathematically
Vito Volterra · 1926-10-16 · Nature 118:558-560
Football Manager 2005
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Foundation (video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Fourier Neural Operator for Parametric Partial Differential Equations
Zongyi Li, Nikola Kovachki, Kamyar Azizzadenesheli · 2020-10-18 · ICLR 2021
Friday Facts #122 - Better Circuit Network I
Robert (Wube Software) · 2016-01-22 · Factorio blog (Wube Software)
Friday Facts #170 - Blueprint library GUI design and redesign
2016-12-23 · Factorio blog (Wube Software)
Friday Facts #176 - Belts optimization for 0.15
Harkonnen · 2017-02-03 · Factorio blog (Wube Software)
Friday Facts #317 - New pathfinding algorithm
Oxyd · 2019-10-18 · Factorio blog (Wube Software)
Friday Facts #375 - Quality
kovarex · 2023-09-08 · Factorio blog (Wube Software)
Friday Facts #384 - Combinators 2.0
kovarex, Klonan · 2023-11-10 · Factorio blog (Wube Software)
Friday Facts #414 - Spoils of Agriculture
V453000 · 2024-06-07 · Factorio blog (Wube Software)
Friday Facts #416 - Fluids 2.0
raiguard · 2024-06-21 · Factorio blog (Wube Software)
Friday Facts #88 - Combinators
2015-05-29 · Factorio blog (Wube Software)
Friendship
Stardew Valley Wiki contributors · 2026 · Stardew Valley Wiki
Game Dev Story
Kairosoft Wiki contributors · 2026 · Kairosoft Wiki (wiki.gg)
Game Dev Story Review (iPhone)
Ryan Davis · 2010-11-02 · Giant Bomb
Game Generation via Large Language Models
Chengpeng Hu, Yunlong Zhao, Jialin Liu · 2024-04-11 · arXiv
Game situation review: December 11, 2015
Screeps team · 2015-12-11 · Screeps blog
Games With AI Disclosures Have Grossed an Estimated $660M on Steam
Totally Human Media · 2025-11-06 · Totally Human blog
Gamescom 2025: DLSS 4 and RTX game announcements
NVIDIA · 2025-08-18 · GeForce News
Gaussian splatting
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
GAVEL: Generating Games Via Evolution and Language Models
Graham Todd, Alexander Padula, Matthew Stephenson · 2024-07-12 · arXiv
GDC 2012: Breaking down SimCity's Glassbox engine
Frank Cifaldi · 2012-03-07 · Game Developer
GDC 2025 State of the Game Industry: Devs weigh in on layoffs, AI, and more
Game Developers Conference · 2025-01 · gdconf.com
GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry reveals impact of layoffs, generative AI, and more
Game Developers Conference · 2026 · gdconf.com
Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People
Joon Sung Park, Carolyn Q. Zou, Jonne Kamphorst · 2024-11-15 · arXiv
Generative agent-based modeling with actions grounded in physical, social, or digital space using Concordia
Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, John P. Agapiou, Avia Aharon · 2023-12-06 · arXiv
Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior
Joon Sung Park, Joseph C. O'Brien, Carrie J. Cai · 2023-04-07 · UIST '23 (ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology)
Genesis speeds up AI robot training with simulations 430,000x faster than reality
Jonathan Kemper · 2024-12-26 · The Decoder
Genesis World (formerly Genesis): a generative and universal physics engine for robotics and beyond
Genesis AI team · 2024-12 · GitHub
Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model
Google DeepMind · 2024-12-04
Genie 3: A new frontier for world models
Google DeepMind · 2025-08-05
Genie: Generative Interactive Environments
Jake Bruce, and others (Google DeepMind) · 2024-02 · ICML 2024
Germs
Oxygen Not Included Wiki contributors · 2026 · Oxygen Not Included Wiki (wiki.gg)
GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers
Elias Frantar, Saleh Ashkboos, Torsten Hoefler · 2022-10-31 · ICLR 2023
GPUDrive: Data-driven, multi-agent driving simulation at 1 million FPS
Saman Kazemkhani, Aarav Pandya, Daphne Cornelisse · 2024-08-02
Gran Turismo (1997 video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Gran Turismo Sophy 2.0 permanently added to Gran Turismo 7
Polyphony Digital · 2023-11-02 · gran-turismo.com
Gran Turismo Sophy Race Together event in Gran Turismo 7
Polyphony Digital · 2023-02-20 · gran-turismo.com
GraphCast: AI model for faster and more accurate global weather forecasting
Google DeepMind · 2023-11-14 · Google DeepMind blog
GraphCast: Learning skillful medium-range global weather forecasting
Remi Lam, Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez, Matthew Willson · 2023-11-14 · Science 382 (2023)
Growing 3D Artefacts and Functional Machines with Neural Cellular Automata
Shyam Sudhakaran, Djordje Grbic, Siyan Li · 2021-03-15 · ALIFE 2021
Growing Neural Cellular Automata
Alexander Mordvintsev, Ettore Randazzo, Eyvind Niklasson · 2020-02-11 · Distill
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Harvest Moon (video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Hearts of Iron IV
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Historical figure
Dwarf Fortress Wiki contributors · 2026 · Dwarf Fortress Wiki
Hound
Don't Starve Wiki contributors · 2026 · Don't Starve Wiki (Fandom)
How a single game trailer turned the tide for Factorio
Mike Rose · 2014-05-27 · Game Developer
How Inworld helped an AI game with 20 million players reach profitability
Inworld AI · 2025-08-01 · Inworld blog
How to use the Machine Learning Deformer in Unreal Engine
Epic Games · 2026 · Unreal Engine documentation
How Townscaper Works: A Story Four Games in the Making
Tommy Thompson · 2022-04-06 · Game Developer
Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning
Meta Fundamental AI Research Diplomacy Team (FAIR) · 2022-11-22 · Science 378(6624):1067-1074
Human-Like Playtesting with Deep Learning
S. Gudmundsson, Philipp Eisen, E. Poromaa · 2018 · IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2018)
Hunger
Don't Starve Wiki contributors · 2026 · Don't Starve Wiki (wiki.gg)
Hunyuan-GameCraft-1.0 model card
Tencent Hunyuan · 2025-08-14 · Hugging Face
Hunyuan-GameCraft: High-dynamic Interactive Game Video Generation with Hybrid History Condition
Jiaqi Li, Junshu Tang, Zhiyong Xu · 2025-06
Hunyuan3D 2.0: Scaling Diffusion Models for High Resolution Textured 3D Assets Generation
Tencent Hunyuan3D Team · 2025-01
Hunyuan3D-2.1 repository
Tencent Hunyuan · 2025-06-13 · GitHub
HunyuanWorld 1.0: Generating Immersive, Explorable, and Interactive 3D Worlds from Words or Pixels
HunyuanWorld Team (Tencent) · 2025-07
I built marshmallow castles in Google's new AI world generator Project Genie
Rebecca Bellan · 2026-01-29 · TechCrunch
Illuminating Diverse Neural Cellular Automata for Level Generation
Sam Earle, Justin Snider, Matthew C. Fontaine · 2021-09-12 · GECCO 2022
Illuminating Mario Scenes in the Latent Space of a Generative Adversarial Network
Matthew C. Fontaine, Ruilin Liu, Ahmed Khalifa · 2020-07-11 · arXiv
Illuminating search spaces by mapping elites
Jean-Baptiste Mouret, Jeff Clune · 2015-04-20 · arXiv
Improving AI Decision Modeling Through Utility Theory
Kevin Dill, Dave Mark · 2010 · Game Developers Conference 2010, AI Summit
Improving Conditional Level Generation using Automated Validation in Match-3 Games
Monica Villanueva Aylagas, Joakim Bergdahl, Jonas Gillberg · 2024 · IEEE Transactions on Games
Improving Playtesting Coverage via Curiosity Driven Reinforcement Learning Agents
Camilo Gordillo, Joakim Bergdahl, Konrad Tollmar · 2021-08 · IEEE Conference on Games 2021
Inspiration
RimWorld Wiki contributors · 2026 · RimWorld Wiki
InterMimic: Towards Universal Whole-Body Control for Physics-Based Human-Object Interactions
Sirui Xu, Hung Yu Ling, Yu-Xiong Wang · 2025-02
Interstellar Logistics Station
Dyson Sphere Program Wiki contributors · 2026 · Dyson Sphere Program Wiki
Introducing Learned Motion Matching
Ubisoft La Forge · 2020-07-30
Introducing Muse: Our first generative AI model designed for gameplay ideation
Microsoft Research · 2025-02-19
Introducing Odyssey-2: A General-Purpose World Model
Oliver Cameron · 2025-10-27 · Odyssey
Introducing Structured Outputs in the API
OpenAI · 2024-08-06 · OpenAI blog
Introducing the Realtime API
OpenAI · 2024-10-01 · OpenAI blog
Introducing V-JEPA 2 world model and new physical reasoning benchmarks
Meta AI · 2025-06-11
Introducing Versu
Emily Short · 2013-02-14 · Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling
Inworld TTS-1.5: Upgrading the #1 Ranked TTS Model with Production-Grade Latency, Expression and Stability
Inworld AI · 2026-01-21 · Inworld blog
Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning
Viktor Makoviychuk, Lukasz Wawrzyniak, Yunrong Guo · 2021-08-24 · NeurIPS 2021 Datasets and Benchmarks
joonspk-research/generative_agents
Joon Sung Park · 2023 · GitHub
JSONSchemaBench: A Rigorous Benchmark of Structured Outputs for Language Models
Saibo Geng, Hudson Cooper, Michał Moskal · 2025-01-18 · arXiv
Julius: an open source re-implementation of Caesar III
bvschaik · 2026 · GitHub
Jurassic World Evolution
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Kerbal Space Program
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Khronos releases KHR_gaussian_splatting glTF extension release candidate
The Khronos Group · 2026-02-03
Kingdoms and Castles
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Kingdoms and Castles on Steam
Lion Shield · 2026 · Steam
KRAFTON Introduces PUBG Ally Beta Test
KRAFTON · 2026-06-16 · KRAFTON press release
Large Language Models and Games: A Survey and Roadmap
Roberto Gallotta, Graham Todd, Marvin Zammit · 2024 · IEEE Transactions on Games
Leaderboard
The Farmer Was Replaced Wiki contributors · 2026 · The Farmer Was Replaced Wiki
Learning in Mean Field Games: A Survey
Mathieu Lauriere, Sarah Perrin, Julien Perolat · 2022-05-25
Learning Mesh-Based Simulation with Graph Networks
Tobias Pfaff, Meire Fortunato, Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez · 2020-10-07 · ICLR 2021
Learning to Simulate Complex Physics with Graph Networks
Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez, Jonathan Godwin, Tobias Pfaff · 2020-02-21 · ICML 2020
Legends
Dwarf Fortress Wiki contributors · 2026 · Dwarf Fortress Wiki
Lenia: Biology of Artificial Life
Bert Wang-Chak Chan · 2018-12-13 · Complex Systems 28(3)
Let Me Speak Freely? A Study on the Impact of Format Restrictions on Performance of Large Language Models
Zhi Rui Tam, Cheng-Kuang Wu, Yi-Lin Tsai · 2024-08-05 · arXiv
Level Generation Through Large Language Models
Graham Todd, Sam Earle, Muhammad Umair Nasir · 2023-02-11 · Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2023)
Liquid Pipe
Oxygen Not Included Wiki contributors · 2026 · Oxygen Not Included Wiki (wiki.gg)
Little Computer People
C64-Wiki contributors · 2026 · C64-Wiki
Little Computer People
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
llama.cpp GBNF grammar guide (grammars/README.md)
ggml-org · 2026 · GitHub
LLM Pruning and Distillation in Practice: The Minitron Approach
Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Saurav Muralidharan, et al. · 2024-08-21 · arXiv
Logistic network
Factorio Wiki contributors · 2026 · Factorio Wiki
Ludii -- The Ludemic General Game System
Éric Piette, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Matthew Stephenson · 2019-05-13 · arXiv
Machine Learning: Physics Simulation, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Squishy Bunnies
Daniel Holden · 2020 · GDC 2020 (GDC Vault)
Madrona: a prototype engine for high-throughput batch simulation
Brennan Shacklett, et al. · 2026 · GitHub
Maintenance
Captain of Industry Wiki contributors · 2026 · Captain of Industry Wiki
Mapping Hearthstone Deck Spaces through MAP-Elites with Sliding Boundaries
Matthew C. Fontaine, Scott Lee, L. B. Soros · 2019-04-24 · arXiv
MarioGPT: Open-Ended Text2Level Generation through Large Language Models
Shyam Sudhakaran, Miguel González-Duque, Claire Glanois · 2023-02-12 · arXiv
MaskedMimic: Unified Physics-Based Character Control Through Masked Motion Inpainting
Chen Tessler, Yunrong Guo, Ofir Nabati · 2024-09 · ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2024)
Mastering Atari Games with Limited Data
Weirui Ye, Shaohuai Liu, Thanard Kurutach · 2021-10-30 · NeurIPS 2021
Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model
Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Thomas Hubert · 2020-12-23 · Nature 588:604-609
Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm
David Silver, Thomas Hubert, Julian Schrittwieser · 2017-12-05 · arXiv
Mastering diverse control tasks through world models
Danijar Hafner, Jurgis Pasukonis, Jimmy Ba · 2025-04-02 · Nature 640:647-653
Mastering the game of Stratego with model-free multiagent reinforcement learning
Julien Perolat, et al. · 2022-12-02 · Science 378:990-996
Mathematical discoveries from program search with large language models
Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Mohammadamin Barekatain, Alexander Novikov · 2023-12-14 · Nature 625, 468-475
Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale
Bogdan Georgiev, Javier Gomez-Serrano, Terence Tao · 2025-11-03
Matrix-Game 2.0: An Open-Source, Real-Time, and Streaming Interactive World Model
Xianglong He, Chunli Peng, Zexiang Liu · 2025-08
Matrix-Game 3.0: Real-Time and Streaming Interactive World Model with Long-Horizon Memory
Zile Wang, Zexiang Liu, and others (Skywork AI) · 2026-04
Mean field games
Jean-Michel Lasry, Pierre-Louis Lions · 2007-03-28 · Japanese Journal of Mathematics 2, 229-260
Mean Field Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Yaodong Yang, Rui Luo, Minne Li · 2018-02-15 · ICML 2018
Mental break
RimWorld Wiki contributors · 2026 · RimWorld Wiki
Micropolis: open-source SimCity source code
Will Wright, Don Hopkins · 2008 · GitHub (SimHacker/micropolis)
Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020 video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020)
PCGamingWiki contributors · 2026 · PCGamingWiki
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
MineWorld: a Real-Time and Open-Source Interactive World Model on Minecraft
Junliang Guo, Yang Ye, Tianyu He · 2025-04
Mini Metro (video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Mirage 2 allows users to turn sketches and photos into interactive game worlds
2025-08-22 · The Decoder
Modeling Individual Personalities in The Sims 3
Richard Evans · 2010 · Game Developers Conference 2010, Programming track
Monte Carlo tree search
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Morale
Oxygen Not Included Wiki contributors · 2026 · Oxygen Not Included Wiki (wiki.gg)
Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue
Alexandre Défossez, Laurent Mazaré, Manu Orsini · 2024-09-17 · arXiv
Motion Matching in Unreal Engine
Epic Games · 2026 · Unreal Engine documentation
Motive
The Sims Wiki contributors · 2026 · The Sims Wiki (Fandom)
Motorsport Manager
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
MudRunner: Porting a Successful Title to Console
Kirill Tokarev · 2019-01-04 · 80.lv
MuJoCo Playground
Kevin Zakka, Baruch Tabanpour, Qiayuan Liao · 2025-02-12 · Robotics: Science and Systems 2025
Multi-Actor Generative Artificial Intelligence as a Game Engine
Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, Jayd Matyas, Logan Cross · 2025-07-10 · arXiv
MuZero's first step from research into the real world
DeepMind · 2022-02-11 · Google DeepMind blog
Natural Gas Generator
Oxygen Not Included Wiki contributors · 2026 · Oxygen Not Included Wiki (wiki.gg)
Natural Language Understanding in Facade: Surface-text Processing
Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern · 2004 · TIDSE 2004 (Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment)
Needs
Anno 1800 Wiki contributors · 2026 · Anno 1800 Wiki (Fandom)
Needs
Prison Architect Wiki contributors · 2026 · Prison Architect Wiki (Fandom)
Noita: a Game Based on Falling Sand Simulation
Daria Loginova · 2019-04-05 · 80.lv
Not Even Wrong: On the Limits of Prediction as Explanation in Cognitive Science
Mark Orr, Drew Cranford, Ken Ford · 2025-09-30 · arXiv
NVIDIA ACE autonomous game characters: PUBG Ally, inZOI Smart Zoi, NARAKA AI teammate
NVIDIA · 2025 · GeForce News
NVIDIA DLSS 4 Introduces Multi Frame Generation and Transformer-Based AI Models
NVIDIA · 2025-01-06 · GeForce News
NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Delivers Major Upgrade With 2nd Gen Transformer Model For Super Resolution and 6X Dynamic Multi Frame Generation
NVIDIA · 2026-01-06 · GeForce News
NVIDIA DLSS 5 Available September 3rd: 3D-Guided Neural Rendering Debuts In NBA 2K27
NVIDIA · 2026-09-01 · GeForce News
NVIDIA open-sources PhysX's GPU simulation code
Jim Thacker · 2025-04-22 · CG Channel
NVIDIA RTX Neural Rendering Introduces Next Era of AI-Powered Graphics Innovation
Ike Nnoli · 2025-01-06 · NVIDIA Technical Blog
NVIDIA, Disney and Google contribute open-source Newton engine to the Linux Foundation
Michael Larabel · 2025-09-29 · Phoronix
NVIGI-Core: NVIDIA In-Game Inferencing SDK core
NVIDIA · 2026 · GitHub
OASIS: Open Agent Social Interaction Simulations with One Million Agents
Ziyi Yang, et al. · 2024-11-18 · arXiv
Offworld Trading Company
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Offworld Trading Company: Early Access First Impressions
2015-03-18 · SpaceSector
OMNI-EPIC: Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness with Environments Programmed in Code
Maxence Faldor, Jenny Zhang, Antoine Cully · 2024-05-24 · arXiv
OpenEvolve: open-source implementation of AlphaEvolve
Asankhaya Sharma · 2025 · GitHub
OpenRCT2 source: Guest.cpp (guest ride choice and thoughts)
OpenRCT2 contributors · 2026 · GitHub (OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2)
OpenRCT2 source: Ride.cpp (ride reliability, inspection, and breakdowns)
OpenRCT2 contributors · 2026 · GitHub (OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2)
Operation Costs
The Farmer Was Replaced Wiki contributors · 2026 · The Farmer Was Replaced Wiki
Operator Level
shapez 2 Wiki contributors · 2026 · shapez 2 Wiki
Opinion
Crusader Kings III Wiki contributors · 2026 · Crusader Kings III Wiki (paradoxwikis.com)
OUT NOW: Autonauts (Denki)
2019-10-18 · The Scottish Games Network
Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples
Lisa P. Argyle, Ethan C. Busby, Nancy Fulda · 2023 · Political Analysis
Out of the Park Baseball
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Outracing champion Gran Turismo drivers with deep reinforcement learning
Peter R. Wurman, et al. · 2022-02-09 · Nature 602:223-228
Oxygen Not Included
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Oxygen Not Included on Steam
Klei Entertainment · 2026 · Steam
Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer (POET): Endlessly Generating Increasingly Complex and Diverse Learning Environments and Their Solutions
Rui Wang, Joel Lehman, Jeff Clune · 2019-01-07 · arXiv
PANGeA: Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI for Turn-Based Video Games
Steph Buongiorno, Lawrence Jake Klinkert, Tanishq Chawla · 2024-04-30 · arXiv
Patched conic approximation
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
PC Building Simulator
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
PCGRL: Procedural Content Generation via Reinforcement Learning
Ahmed Khalifa, Philip Bontrager, Sam Earle · 2020-01-24 · arXiv
PhysGaussian: Physics-Integrated 3D Gaussians for Generative Dynamics
Tianyi Xie, Zeshun Zong, Yuxing Qiu · 2023-11
Pipeline
Satisfactory Wiki contributors · 2026 · Satisfactory Wiki
Player-Driven Emergence in LLM-Driven Game Narrative
Xiangyu Peng, Jessica Quaye, Sudha Rao · 2024-04-25 · arXiv
Pluribus: First AI to beat pros in 6-player poker
Facebook AI, Carnegie Mellon University · 2019-07-11 · Facebook AI blog
Pocket City review: Build and manage your dream city
Christine Chan · 2018-08-13 · iMore
Pocket City – Premium City Building for Mobile
David Ingrusee · 2019-11-10 · Indie Hive
Pollution
Factorio Wiki contributors · 2026 · Official Factorio Wiki
Polyculture
The Farmer Was Replaced Wiki contributors · 2026 · The Farmer Was Replaced Wiki
Pops
Victoria 3 Wiki contributors · 2026 · Victoria 3 Wiki (paradoxwikis.com)
Population
Anno 1800 Wiki contributors · 2026 · Anno 1800 Wiki (Fandom)
Population
Captain of Industry Wiki contributors · 2026 · Captain of Industry Wiki
Power
Satisfactory Wiki contributors · 2026 · Satisfactory Wiki
Power generator
Fallout Wiki contributors · 2026 · Fallout Wiki (Fandom)
PowerWash Simulator
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Predicting Game Difficulty and Churn Without Players
Shaghayegh Roohi, Asko Relas, Jari Takatalo · 2020-08-29 · ACM CHI PLAY 2020
Prison Architect on Steam
Introversion Software, Double Eleven · 2026 · Steam
Probabilistic weather forecasting with machine learning
Ilan Price, Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez, Ferran Alet · 2024-12-04 · Nature 637, 84-90
Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity
Daniele Gravina, Ahmed Khalifa, Antonios Liapis · 2019-07-09 · IEEE Conference on Games 2019
Project Genie (website)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Project Hospital: a realistic take on hospital simulation
2020-03-08 · Journal of Geek Studies
Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization
Altera.AL, Andrew Ahn, Nic Becker · 2024-10-31 · arXiv
Prom Week
Josh McCoy, Mike Treanor, Ben Samuel · 2013-10 · Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) 9(1)
Prom Week Released on Facebook!
Mike Treanor · 2012-02-14 · Grand Text Auto
Quality-Diversity through AI Feedback
Herbie Bradley, Andrew Dai, Hannah Teufel · 2023-10-19 · arXiv
Raid points
RimWorld Wiki contributors · 2026 · RimWorld Wiki
Rail signal
Factorio Wiki contributors · 2026 · Factorio Wiki
Railroad Tycoon (video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Real-Time Fluid Dynamics for Games
Jos Stam · 2003 · Game Developers Conference 2003
Regime
Prison Architect Wiki contributors · 2026 · Prison Architect Wiki (paradoxwikis.com)
Relaxing nature sim Equilinox is out and seems to be a hit with users
2018-11 · GamingOnLinux
Resource node
Satisfactory Wiki contributors · 2026 · Satisfactory Wiki (wiki.gg)
Review: Pocket City
CJ Andriessen · 2018-08-11 · Destructoid
Richelieu: Self-Evolving LLM-Based Agents for AI Diplomacy
Zhenyu Guan, Xiangyu Kong, Fangwei Zhong · 2024-07-09 · arXiv
Ride rating calculation
OpenRCT2 contributors · 2026 · OpenRCT2 wiki (GitHub)
Road to the IGF: Zachtronics' Opus Magnum
Joel Couture · 2019-02-18 · Game Developer
RollerCoaster Tycoon
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
RollerCoaster Tycoon (video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Rows of corn, lines of code: Swiss automation game The Farmer Was Replaced launches 10 October
2025-09-12 · GamesMarket
sbi reloaded: a toolkit for simulation-based inference workflows
Jan Boelts, Michael Deistler, Manuel Gloeckler · 2024-11-26
Scaling Instructable Agents Across Many Simulated Worlds
SIMA Team (Google DeepMind) · 2024-03-13 · arXiv
Scaling up Mean Field Games with Online Mirror Descent
Julien Perolat, Sarah Perrin, Romuald Elie · 2021-02-28
Schedule I (video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Screeps blog: Indiegogo updates, November 2014 to February 2015
Screeps team · 2014-12 · Screeps blog
Screeps private server released!
Screeps team · 2016-11 · Screeps blog
See What's New In Teardown Creator's Custom Voxel Physics Engine
Amber Rutherford · 2025-01-22 · 80.lv
ShinkaEvolve: Towards Open-Ended And Sample-Efficient Program Evolution
Robert Tjarko Lange, Yuki Imajuku, Edoardo Cetin · 2025-09-17
SIMA 2: A Generalist Embodied Agent for Virtual Worlds
SIMA Team (Google DeepMind) · 2025-12-04 · arXiv
SIMA 2: An Agent that Plays, Reasons, and Learns With You in Virtual 3D Worlds
Google DeepMind SIMA Team · 2025-11-13 · Google DeepMind blog
SimCity (1989 video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
SimCity (2013 video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Simulating Human Behavior with AI Agents
Joon Sung Park, Carolyn Q. Zou, Aaron Shaw · 2025-05-20 · Stanford HAI policy brief
Simulation Principles from Dwarf Fortress
Tarn Adams · 2015 · Game AI Pro 2, ed. Steve Rabin, CRC Press (chapter 41)
Skillful joint probabilistic weather forecasting from marginals
Ferran Alet, Ilan Price, Andrew El-Kadi · 2025-06-12
Social Story Worlds With Comme il Faut
Joshua McCoy, Mike Treanor, Ben Samuel · 2014-06 · IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 6(2)
Some notes on programming objects in The Sims
Kenneth D. Forbus, Will Wright · 2001-05-31 · Qualitative Reasoning Group, Northwestern University (course notes)
Sony AI Expands Capabilities of Breakthrough AI Agent Gran Turismo Sophy
Sony AI · 2025-03-27 · Sony AI
Space Age
Factorio Wiki contributors · 2026 · Factorio Wiki
Space Elevator
Satisfactory Wiki contributors · 2026 · Satisfactory Wiki
Space Platforms
shapez 2 Wiki contributors · 2026 · shapez 2 Wiki
Species 0.7.0 Released!
Quasar · 2014-10-03 · Species development blog
Steamworks Documentation: Content Survey (generative AI disclosure)
Valve · 2026 · Steamworks documentation
Stellaris Dev Diary #11: Research & Technology
Doomdark · 2015-11-30 · Paradox Interactive forums
Stellaris Dev Diary #21: Administrative Sectors
2016-02 · Paradox Interactive forums
Stockpile
RimWorld Wiki contributors · 2026 · RimWorld Wiki
Stress
Dwarf Fortress Wiki contributors · 2026 · Dwarf Fortress Wiki
Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation
Jianfeng Xiang, Zelong Lv, Sicheng Xu · 2024-12 · CVPR 2025
Student of Games: A unified learning algorithm for both perfect and imperfect information games
Martin Schmid, Matej Moravčík, Neil Burch · 2023-11-17 · Science Advances 9(46)
Subspace Neural Physics: Fast Data-Driven Interactive Simulation
Daniel Holden, Bang Chi Duong, Sayantan Datta · 2019-07 · ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2019
Succession
Crusader Kings III Wiki contributors · 2026 · Crusader Kings III Wiki (paradoxwikis.com)
Sunflowers
The Farmer Was Replaced Wiki contributors · 2026 · The Farmer Was Replaced Wiki
Superhuman AI for heads-up no-limit poker: Libratus beats top professionals
Noam Brown, Tuomas Sandholm · 2018-01-26 · Science 359:418-424
Superhuman AI for multiplayer poker
Noam Brown, Tuomas Sandholm · 2019-07-11 · Science 365:885-890
Supply
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki contributors · 2026 · Hearts of Iron IV Wiki (Paradox Wikis)
Surgeon Simulator
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Technical Challenges of Deploying Reinforcement Learning Agents for Game Testing in AAA Games
Jonas Gillberg, Joakim Bergdahl, Alessandro Sestini · 2023-08 · IEEE Conference on Games 2023
Texture Generation with Neural Cellular Automata
Alexander Mordvintsev, Eyvind Niklasson, Ettore Randazzo · 2021-05-15
The AI Systems of Left 4 Dead
Michael Booth · 2009-10 · Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE) 2009, Stanford
The Fallout Shelter FAQ, Section 10: The Wasteland
therabidsquirel · 2026 · GitHub wiki
The Fallout Shelter FAQ, Section 1: Important Information
therabidsquirel · 2026 · GitHub wiki
The Fallout Shelter FAQ, Section 4: Dweller Happiness and Health
therabidsquirel · 2026 · GitHub wiki
The Fallout Shelter FAQ, Section 6: Incidents
therabidsquirel · 2026 · GitHub wiki
The frontier of simulation-based inference
Kyle Cranmer, Johann Brehmer, Gilles Louppe · 2019-11-04 · PNAS 117(48)
The Incredible Machine
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
The NEW Surprising Number of Steam Games that Use GenAI
Totally Human Media · 2025-07-13 · Totally Human blog
The Oregon Trail (1971 video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
The Oregon Trail (1985 video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
The Prom: An Example of Socially-Oriented Gameplay
Josh McCoy, Mike Treanor, Ben Samuel · 2010 · Proceedings of the Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE)
The Sims 2/Careers
StrategyWiki contributors · 2026 · StrategyWiki
The Surprising Number of Steam Games that Use GenAI
Totally Human Media · 2024-04-24 · Totally Human blog
The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics
Eric T. Lofgren, Nina H. Fefferman · 2007-09 · The Lancet Infectious Diseases 7(9):625-629
Theme Park (video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Thermal Conductivity
Oxygen Not Included Wiki contributors · 2026 · Oxygen Not Included Wiki (wiki.gg)
Tire and Vehicle Dynamics (3rd edition)
Hans B. Pacejka · 2012-04-12 · Butterworth-Heinemann (Elsevier)
Training Agents Inside of Scalable World Models
Danijar Hafner, Wilson Yan, Timothy Lillicrap · 2025-09-29 · arXiv
Traits
Crusader Kings III Wiki contributors · 2026 · Crusader Kings III Wiki (paradoxwikis.com)
Transport belts/Physics
Factorio Wiki contributors · 2026 · Official Factorio Wiki
Turns, rounds and time-keeping systems in games
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Two Point Hospital
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Ubisoft La Forge produces a data-driven physics simulation based on machine learning
Ubisoft La Forge · 2019-09-19 · Ubisoft news
Understanding game loop, time and ticks
2026 · Screeps documentation
Unity
Captain of Industry Wiki contributors · 2026 · Captain of Industry Wiki
Unity: A General Platform for Intelligent Agents
Arthur Juliani, Vincent-Pierre Berges, Ervin Teng · 2018-09-07 · arXiv
Unlocks
The Farmer Was Replaced Wiki contributors · 2026 · The Farmer Was Replaced Wiki
Using Large Language Models to Simulate Multiple Humans and Replicate Human Subject Studies
Gati Aher, Rosa I. Arriaga, Adam Tauman Kalai · 2022-08-18 · arXiv
V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning
Mido Assran, Nicolas Ballas, Yann LeCun · 2025-06
Vault dwellers (Fallout Shelter)
Fallout Wiki contributors · 2026 · Fallout Wiki (Fandom)
Versu: A Simulationist Storytelling System
Richard Evans, Emily Short · 2014 · IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 6(2)
Victoria 3 Dev Diary #54: Trade Revisions
Paradox Development Studio · 2022-08-10 · Paradox Interactive
Victoria 3 Dev Diary #6: Interest Groups
Paradox Development Studio · 2021 · Paradox Interactive forum
Victoria 3 Dev Diary #74 - UX Improvements
Henrik (Paradox UX designer) · 2023 · Paradox Interactive forums
Victoria 3 Dev Diary #80: Law Enactment and Revolution Clock in 1.3
Paradox Development Studio · 2023-04-06 · Paradox Interactive
Victoria 3 Dev Diary #9: National Markets
Paradox Development Studio · 2021 · Paradox Interactive forum
Viva Piñata (video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models
Guanzhi Wang, Yuqi Xie, Yunfan Jiang · 2023-05 · Transactions on Machine Learning Research (2024)
Warp Speed: NVIDIA Open-Source Framework Accelerates Scientific Computing in Python
Fred Oh · 2024-12-05 · NVIDIA Blog
Wave Function Collapse Explained
Boris the Brave · 2020-04-13 · boristhebrave.com
WaveFunctionCollapse
Maxim Gumin · 2016-09-30 · GitHub (mxgmn)
WaveFunctionCollapse is Constraint Solving in the Wild
Isaac Karth, Adam M. Smith · 2017-08 · Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2017)
Weather
Stardew Valley Wiki contributors · 2026 · Stardew Valley Wiki
WHAMM real-time Quake II world model (Microsoft Research blog)
Microsoft Research · 2025-04
Where Winds Meet on Steam
Everstone Studio, NetEase Games · 2025-11-14 · Steam
Why we recommend Path Signals
nielsmh · 2021-11-06 · OpenTTD news
Winning Isn't Everything: Enhancing Game Development with Intelligent Agents
Yunqi Zhao, Igor Borovikov, Fernando de Mesentier Silva · 2019-03-25 · arXiv
With 100K copies sold in less than 2 weeks, this Steam game could be the next Papers, Please
2023-03 · Twinfinite
Word2World: Generating Stories and Worlds through Large Language Models
Muhammad U. Nasir, Steven James, Julian Togelius · 2024-05-06 · arXiv
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic on Steam
3Division, Hooded Horse · 2026 · Steam
World and Human Action Models towards gameplay ideation
Anssi Kanervisto, Dave Bignell, Linda Yilin Wen · 2025-02 · Nature 638(8051): 656-663
WorldPlay: Towards Long-Term Geometric Consistency for Real-Time Interactive World Modeling
Wenqiang Sun, Haiyu Zhang, and others (Tencent Hunyuan) · 2025-12
XGrammar: Flexible and Efficient Structured Generation Engine for Large Language Models
Yixin Dong, Charlie F. Ruan, Yaxing Cai · 2024-11-22 · arXiv
Yan: Foundational Interactive Video Generation
Yan Team (Tencent) · 2025-08
Zoo Tycoon (2001 video game)
Wikipedia contributors · 2026 · Wikipedia