Your reply is somewhat self-contradictory. If games are interactive simulations by nature, why is DF so unusual? There is a trend to call many modern games "immersive sims" and somehow they don't produce such stories.

In my opinion game developers have mostly stopped trying to simulate things. The focus is on clothes, rigid crafting systems, skill trees, storyline, cutscenes, vehicles, item collection. It's sandboxes, not simulations. Does Witcher 3 have emergence? Does GTA?

Compare that to Bullfrog, a game company which made simulations almost exclusively. In the 90's "simulation" was a game genre.

> If games are interactive simulations by nature, why is DF so unusual?

It’s an honest attempt at making a thorough simulation. Most games attempt only shallow rules and simulations — nearly everything that happens in Witcher 3 is encoded precisely, with few knock-on effects (because there’s nothing underneath the immediate effect + visualization — what’s modeled is precisely what you see); leading to the lack of emergent behavior. You’re dealing with a fairly rudimentary and static system. GTA is more flexible, but ultimately nothing follows any particular logic that doesn’t revolve around the player. More notably, in both games, if the player doesn’t exist, the world can no longer reasonably operate.

Simulation is inherent to game design, but very few games actively work towards it, as you’ve seen.

The simulation games of the 90’s were in the right vein — they faltered for practical reasons. As a result, they often make for thorough simulations that are dishonest — the internal logic of the simulation is violated for reasons of hardware limitations, UX simplicity, fun, etc. Tornados happen because it’s fun. DF is honest in the sense that it is only compromised by Tarn’s inability to implement something (and practical impact — it’s not worth trying to model atoms when fluid dynamics will suffice).

I don’t mean that DF produces a “realistic” simulation (as a climate scientist might) but that he produces a uncompromisingly logically consistent one (as a fiction author might)

> There is a trend to call many modern games "immersive sims" and somehow they don't produce such stories.

For what it's worth, "immersive sim" is more a sub-genre of first-person action game (games with a heavy focus on world-building, player choice, and stealth, heavily inspired by the games Thief and Deus Ex) than a descriptor. It fit better when it was first introduced in the early aughts, when those games were notably more interactive than the more static worlds of fast-paced, action-first, twitchy shooters of the era (Quake, Half-Life, Unreal, etc).

I absolutely agree with this, but it's an unpopular opinion that draws fire. Actual ambitious simulations are rare which is why they stand out. Rain World is one of my favorites. Rimworld is ok but the creator openly admits he doesn't want to go as deep as DF.