Let me concoct a trivial example. Suppose you wanted to know whether a bowling ball would drop from the top of a building faster than a tennis ball. You can do this without reference to theory - just go out and experiment. Doing the experiment would not give you the complete physical picture perhaps, but it would certainly
(a) answer your narrow question and
(b) give you a constraint that any theory must explain.
The problem is that there is a class of research where people who are faced with this question, would set up a computer model. Now let's say they didn't realise they had to model air resistance. They will discover something all right, but it will neither answer the narrow question, nor provide a robust constraint for theory.
In other words, playing around with computational models is not, by itself, theory or experimentation unless you are very careful on how you tie it back to the physical world.