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It also explains why all the links are dead

Yes. It goes further back than that. That's what Alan Kay thought Smalltalk should be for. Read "Personal Dynamic Media".

Going forward, there are the persistent shared modifiable virtual worlds, from There to Second Life to SineSpace and beyond. There are many good 3D CAD systems now, and the pro ones have some simulation capability. There's Minecraft and its imitators.

We have the capability, and sizable numbers of users. It's not mainstream, but it's in wide use.

Alan Kay (and others) developed a 3D collaborative world in Smalltalk called Croquet [1]. Definitely one of the most interesting virtual worlds I've come across.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project

It goes further back than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula

Around 1996 was the hayday of Artificial Life and Complex Adaptive Systems research and (agent-based) computer simulation of living systems, including ecological, social and economical, was a very common topic in popular science publications.

Yeah, when the page first loaded, I thought somebody actually took "motherfuckingwebsite.com" seriously and built a raw HTML page with no margins or padding beyond the browser defaults.