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i've had so many of these working on imsims. my first was the guards in my stealth game who could hear each other's footsteps and if they didn't already know roughly where the other guy was they would investigate each other and be surprised to see each other. in first person this looks like nothing

the idea (and this worked) was that if the player made a noise and a guard heard it and then investigated and didn't find the player but did find another guard they would assume the guard made that noise and not be alert anymore because "oh it was just bob". "cool" but basically never ever legible

another one was, i made the rain in Weird West, which wets things and fills containers and puts fires out and whatever. for a long time i had the rain coming in at the correct angle based on the wind, so in a storm you could shelter behind a building and get less wet. "cool". not legible, not useful

the player only ever assumes the place you'd stand to get wet is "outside"; the cool behaviour only ever reads as a bug, "was outside, didn't get wet". or "got wet inside" because you were near a window. i changed it to a straight-down line trace

idk if it is a common word but i have always called this "oversimulating". which is interesting to think about in an imsim because you really are looking to "simulate", on some level, most things. that's how you get the emergence. but you can oversimulate. you get a feel for where the line is

not quite the same but also in WW, if a barrel is full of water you can drink it. if it initially has oil or poison in it, you can tip it out and set it upright and wait for rain and it fills with water. for a while, the "drink" verb was on the barrel no matter what. you could drink oil or poison

theoretically you could devise a reason to do that but we took it out. not sure if at any stage it was advantageous to be poisoned ever. i *think* if you drank the oil you vomited? no good reason to vomit though

coolest cut interaction i think, even though it was right to cut it, was if someone had too much to drink they would vomit and the vomit was the alcohol and the alcohol was flammable. so you'd get a guy drinking too much at the saloon and vomiting near a candle. whole place erupts into chaos

you didn't even have to be near the saloon for this to happen so of course sometimes you'd just rock up and everyone was dead or fighting or on fire