I don't know if that would work as well as it sounds. I mean, I'm not observing what's going on in China at the moment, but it will certainly impact my life in

I don't know if that would work as well as it sounds. I mean, I'm not observing what's going on in China at the moment, but it will certainly impact my life in some way, if only through the butterfly effect. In the worst case, my actions one minute into the future may depend on something as far as one light-minute from me. That's larger than the whole planet. And there are more problems. One of them is computers: in a sense, every computer created by one of the entities you simulate becomes a new "player". You have to fully simulate these computers all the time, lest you want the players to notice computers only work when they look at them. I mean, ultimately, it seems to me that the only way to efficiently simulate a universe without arbitrary restriction on motion or glaring artefacts is to build a 1:1 model of the thing: store the data in 3D so that things that are nearby in simulated space are nearby in physical space too, and process the data locally.