Something similar was done for the 1996 game Creatures. A part of the diorama still survives and is on display at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge (https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/42694/Creatures-Deve...).
Understanding how wants and needs drove actions, and marvelling at the language learning game mechanic. The genetics gameplay as well. It was well ahead of its time. I was early teens when I first played it, the same year I started learning to make games in Dark Basic.