Eh I can tell you that variations on the above scenario are actually useful. There's a handful of companies that essentially do more in-depth versions of these

Eh I can tell you that variations on the above scenario are actually useful. There's a handful of companies that essentially do more in-depth versions of these things at like the level of "h1n1 comes to small town america; what emergent behavior patterns do we see in our model" (names escaping me sorry). There's also a lot of boring-ish economics sims that've been done (names escaping me also, sorry). To make it fun for the end-user you'd have to "borrow" tilesets from a videogame I think. You're right though: it's more fun for the person making it than a casual observer.