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[InfiniVide]

What I'm interested in is games or simulations you can let run on their own with little to no interaction from the player.  I have artificial life simulations like Gene Pool that I've always liked, and I'm wondering what other games like this anyone might know about.

[freeformschooler]

Obviously there's Progress Quest.

[Astral]

Universe Sandbox on Steam is a good one to sit back and watch; just load a simulation and see how things turn out.

[Dutchling]

There is an observe command in Crusader Kings 2 which I sometimes use to see what the AI makes of the world.

And about gene pool, what are all the thingies actually doing? Are they just moving randomly or is there anything else?
edit: never mind, they seem to make eggs if you drag them together.

[InfiniVide]

Gene Pool is more along the lines of an evolution simulation.  The swimmers will sometimes have mutations and if they mate, there's a chance they'll pass that along.  Sometimes the swimmers will all die out but other times they'll thrive.  You can even tweak the environment to change variables with the food.

[Dutchling]

If the arrows in gene pool indicate in which direction they try to move, than all my genes are failures :|

[BigD145]

Some others that come to mind are Majesty: Fantasy Kingdom Sim and the Creatures series, but those do allow/involve a fair amount of interaction. The actual characters are fully automated though.

Much like DF.

[InfiniVide]

If the arrows in gene pool indicate in which direction they try to move, than all my genes are failures :|

Arrows point to the swimmer with which they want to mate

[Empty]

A lot of the kairosoft games could be described like what the OP said.

[ebarstad]

I made the mistake of thinking Sims 3 would be like this, that's I'd be able to create sims with interesting character traits and watch them interact with the world, but they don't really do much of anything on their own without player intervention.

[justinlee999]

A lot of the kairosoft games could be described like what the OP said.

Strangely enough I was hooked onto game dev story again this afternoon.

Anyway, the kairosoft games still need a fair amount of player direction, so uh...

[Moogie]

It was mentioned offhandedly already, but the Creatures series is pretty much the definitive sit-and-watch sim. All three of the main games have their advantages and disadvantages and are each worth a look; just steer clear of Creatures Village, which is more like a kid's puzzle game.

My personal favourite is C1, for its graphics and simplicity. From C2 onwards, the games began introducing more technology and gadgets, and the graphics became progressively more primitive-prerendered-3D (aka ugly shiny rounded plastic shapes stuck together, then rendered as 2D-sprites). But if you can ignore that, the AI is vastly improved over the previous iterations.

[InfiniVide]

I actually did start playing C3 a few years ago.  I'd even managed (through splicing) to make Grendels that could breed

[DeKaFu]

Haha... What immediately comes to mind for me is a "game" called "Fin Fin". I had it when I was a kid and loved the heck out of it.

The premise was that was an alien planet occupied by this half-dolphin half-bird creature that would fly around to six fixed-view locations and live its life. Interaction was entirely limited to:
1. Offering a fruit to Fin Fin in one of the locations.
2. Beating a drum in one of the locations.
3. Talking into the microphone at Fin Fin, which never had any effect I could detect except startling him if you yelled.

What made it awesome was that the planet had its own ecosystem with a bunch of bizarre animals and plants which you could catch glimpses of. It also worked in real time based on your system clock and calendar: The time of day would change with reality, seasons would pass and seasonal plants would grow and die. There were a few special events that only happened once per (real) year. There was also weather and stuff, it was so cool. [/nostalgia]

I basically played it as a wildlife photography thing, trying to catch screenshots of all the animals, some of which I only encountered once in a couple years of playing.

That said, it was a commercial product and even if you can find it, I don't know if it's even possible to make it work on XP, to be honest.

[Peewee]

Does Conway's Game of Life count?