At the time, though, few proved able to grasp this reality that, just because something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck on a computer screen, that doesn’t mean it is an accurate simulation of a duck. “When I was running Lower Gomorrah, something that looked like a city and felt like a city,” pondered tech journalist Steven Levy, “was I really manipulating anything that bore formal resemblance to a city? How relevant is the imitation of the real thing?” (The answers to these questions, for the record, are “not really” and “not very.”)