Indeed. But that's his problem. He's been in a hole for 30 years while the gaming industry grew and evolved exponentially through the actions and competition of thousands of individuals and companies. His vision of simulating complex systems with simple approximations from mathematical formulae and algorithms has been realized countless times. You mentioned some great (and sophisticated) examples but honestly, almost every single game has some elements of these these design ideas. It's nothing new ... and honestly kind of obvious. Anyone who wants to make a strategy game has to figure out how to believably simulate behaviour on computing devices of the time. If you're talking about computers in the 80s, you are forced to find simple mathematical expressions because a more complex simulation will bog your game down. So I'm not even sure how novel his ideas were, even in the early 80s.

This is also why it's so hard to meaningfully come up with something novel by thinking really really hard about it in a secluded cave. You need to refine your ideas by constantly testing them in the market of ideas either through collaboration or concrete implementation.

Aurora 4x is a great example. It's a highly niche game developed by a single programmer that models variety of systems and is completely free.

It's hard to get into, but the systems it implements compliment each other really well to create a realistic space empire building game.

Examples you mentioned above are all "mass market" (except DF) in comparison.

I was looking for the mention of Dwarf Fortress - it appears to implement much of what he's describing in the story simulations of Worldgen.

Dwarf Fortress' creator Tarn Adams is the antithesis of this guy, as far as I can see from a brief perusal of his articles beyond this one. Tarn is humble, often plays down his acheivements, is really interested in how his players and community interact with the systems, and builds out complexity based on the desires and needs of the players.

I don't mean to diminish the work of Crawford, but he is building the same kind of simulationst mechanisms that Adams is, but Adams hit on success partly because of his personality.

I agree - Adams is incredibly humble (and shy) - and he's driven by making the game he wants to play; he cares less about the mechanisms and more about the results - he wants edifying gameplay and a game that can tell STORIES.

It's almost perfectly the academic/amateur divide if you will; which is amusing given Adams' background in education.