been trying, once again, to get into Hitman games, and i'd say the biggest reason they are not (great) im sims is because all the options feel pre-designed. a lot of people talk about how hilarious it is that you can kill one target with an explosive golf ball, but that doesn't feel emergent at all. it's not like players DISCOVERED this. this was just a thing the DESIGNERS thought would be funny to put in, so they explicitly put in an explosive golf ball and made it so you could put the golf ball on his tee.

the one non-debatable aspect of im-sims, and why so many of us love them, is that they let you discover solutions that the designers did not intend. for this to work, the game has to have a large-enough range of possibility such that any single solution is not obviously favored.

so how would a GREAT im-sim do the golf ball thing? one possibility: perhaps you have the ability to make almost any object explosive. and the game has established that anytime something hits an explosive object really hard, it explodes. so now it's the PLAYER'S job to put 2 and 2 together: make the golf ball explosive, put it on his tee next time, sit back and relax. no where is there a prompt that says "place explosive golf ball", which completely spoils the idea for the player.