When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer.
He turned incredibly complex systems into games and games into systems, so that reading his game manuals made you think about the whole world.
One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual systems or logical rules they're playing with, and just learning to trick something that's already inscrutable and smarter than them. Mastering AI prompts or even running your own neural net doesn't teach anything like logic or the kind of deep, recursive cause and effect structure you could get from Will Wright's toys, or even from CK3... even if you get all your prompts perfect to make what you want, it teaches something much more like dependence on a magical oracle than, say, a toy/game/sim that really encourages you to deconstruct and take pleasure in all its interconnections that you can understand.