[slightwinder]

> In practice, high-quality simulations seem to be interesting but not all that fun.

I think a great deal about good games is the communication of their black box of rules and mechanics. In a simulation this is especially hard, as much to communicate, and they are usually created by more techno-orientated people, which simply suck at these things. So the player is confronted with a highly complex world where things happen, but for the player it's not always obvious why something happened, which impact their actions have, and sometimes they don't even get that something happened. Thus, giving players a way to explore the rules of the simulation, and understand the state of the world they are playing, is far more important in a simulation because of it's complexity.