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Reminds me of a bit in one of Neal Stephenson's books where a MMORPG company hired a team of geologists to generate a geologically plausible map for their game. The hardest part of their job was finding ways to integrate the parts of the world that had been made up without any regard geology and made no sense in their model.

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Reamde was the book if any are interested.

A cool part was one of the engineers complaining when a powerful user cast a spell that deformed the landscape. The whole world was a huge finite element simulation so that one spell cause CPU usage to spike as whole world had to be updated.

The book was fun, sort of a thriller, but I felt Stephenson could have done more exploring the world of the MMO game. A rare complaint for him.

Cast in another light, it was standard Stephenson fare -- the first half of the book explores a topic deeply and interestingly, then the second half basically sets it aside to trail off into some weird no-man's land. Seveneves was particularly obvious version of this issue.

I thought Seveneves was more like two "first half of Stephenson novels" smushed together; I found myself wishing there was more exploration of the "second" world. I thought the cultural evolution stuff was super interesting.

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