“The universe starts looking less like a real thing, and more like a grand idea. Welcome to the matrix.”
The concept does in fact resemble, roughly, the kinds of “shortcuts” that programmers use in simulations. If you are building a computer game with a giant world and thousands of mobile objects, you don’t have the simulation play out every detail constantly, because that wastes processing power simulating things the player is not around to see. You only simulate in real time perhaps one level, or even the immediate area that the player can see, then just shift the area you are simulating as the player moves and looks around.
That’s a great analogy.
This universe could be a computer simulation.
Proof this universe is a computer simulation
http://thespiritscience.net/2016/05/14/we-live-in-a-computer-simulation-heres-the-proof/