A thought plopped in my head and brewed all day

I was reading quotes from earlier in the day: stuff Will Wright was saying about how video games and computers can bridge gaps in the human synaptic pathways, allowing us all to express and share our creative ideas better. Minecraft and Spore have been good examples of this, but it gave me some thought.

I've been using SimCity as a creation engine for simulating a city for a creative setting of mine. Little game events have helped flesh out so many parts of the back story, it's rather interesting. One of my friends uses Dwarf Fortress for generating fantasy world maps.

When I first started playing D&D, I used the character creator from Neverwinter Nights, took screenshots of that, and printed out the picture with my character sheet when my dad would run games for me.

I have copies of Age of Empires and Age of Empires II. Could I use them to develop the battlements of the massive city fortress for the second half of my fantasy story? Or indeed I do have Stronghold, and perhaps that would be more suited?

Indeed could I not use Spore to develop wild and unique monsters for fantasy and horror? (I can't, I don't have a copy, but that can be fixed.)

Fans of Goosebumps, the stories of Horrorland were some of the most memorable... and the Rollercoaster Tycoon thread about the sadistic "Mr Bone's Wild Ride" certainly has such a feeling of dread. Could I not lay out my own themepark of horror for my own stories by cracking that game out of the closet too?

The internal layout of a hospital, why not ThemeHospital? (I do have a copy.)

So much emphasis on simulator games is in recreating epic historical battles, or ramming two epic forces together, or meeting obscure goals in a checklist to feel like you're as good a manager as a real Mayor/Monster/King/Emperor/Manager. But what if, indeed, these games can be used for even more?

Perhaps sometimes what we see as games, can be tools too. And if that's the case, said tools are a feast of entertainment, both creative and hedonistic.

I wonder what I can come up with.