@cb yeah. the more i think about it, it might just be that there's actually an inherent conflict between "immersion" and "control". like, real life is very immersive, but real-world behaviors of things like people, or distant, unseen systems are impossible to predict or 'play with' in the same way a puzzle or weapon is. in order to make them legible enough to be fun, you have to adopt a bird's eye view, like strategy games, then you lose the immersion. so i guess 'immersive' 'sim' is an oxymoron