There's a much much more advanced version of this tool used for systems design in game design called Machinations. You can model really complex economies with it.
Now that I've left the games industry I still think about this tool often and how it might be useful for modeling load on a backend. Kind of waiting for an opportunity to try it out.
It's a nice idea, but it's too simple for most systems simulations. It is, however, a splendid interface for building simulations. I'd hope the author hooks it up to a simulation framework at some point, exposing a much wider range of tools.
(Or builds their own framework, IDK. I just want to build more complex systems by drawing on a canvas :)
It's a very simplistic tool, but it is great to help visualise and illustrate some systems. It helped me demonstrate the dynamic between technical complexity, delivery pressure and velocity (then add refactoring) https://medium.com/pageup-tech/the-system-of-technical-compl...
I've been also thinking about systems like this, but wouldn't you need constraints and counting? I mean let's say you modeled human behavior based on basic economic principles, then you'd have constrains/rules like:
if money < x, stay home (and you wouldn't meet new people and have an impact)
if money < y, walk instead of taking a bus (and you would get only so far, your reach is small)
if money < z, have no energy to do new things (your behavior would stay the same)
if energy < c, die
edit: adjustments
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There’s also Minsky. Looks to be a bit more comprehensive with an eye to economics.
I love loopy for the crazy simplicity, it's good just to illustrate the moving pieces. But when you want to model something, the next tool I'd turn to is Insight Maker
Someone ported https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3 to it: https://insightmaker.com/insight/2531/My-World3
So you can do a lot with it. You can even do sensitivity analysis with it! The devs are super responsive, I made a feature request and they implemented it in a day.
Loopy is pretty neat. I played around with modeling glucose, but I couldn't get the arrows to model glucose uptake quite the way I wanted. https://bit.ly/2CjjaO0
I was playing with it to try to model a simple regenerative system from permaculture design -- the "Three Sisters" plant guild: https://preview.tinyurl.com/ydxqmmwd
The model is really off since I can't specify units or connection weights. I was hoping the tool would be adequate enough to use as a kind of visualization or a kind of sandbox/lab to illustrate different regenerative processes. Might still work.
Love it, always liked iThink to model systems but the price is going through the ceiling in the last decade.
I've often thought that municipal or even state governments should make available an interactive budget tool for constituents using this kind of visualization.
The purpose would be to show that everything the gov't does is connected through incoming taxes and outgoing expenditures - and there are very tough choices when it comes to the direction of taxes.