If [naturalism] is true, then all minds, and all the contents and powers and effects of minds, are entirely caused by natural [i.e. fundamentally nonmental] phenomena. But if naturalism is false, then some minds, or some of the contents or powers or effects of minds, are causally independent of nature. In other words, such things would then be partly or wholly caused by themselves, or exist or operate directly or fundamentally on their own.

— Richard Carrier

It's not a matter of whether they are "made of different stuff" but if they are made of stuff at all. A simulator is no more supernatural to us than we are to a boxed AI; we're both running inside the same material universe, just in different ways.

I can't think of something more godlike than creating or designing the universe, can you?

Sure. For instance, some theists claim that God created and maintains logic itself.

Moreover, a simulator who is not ontologically basic (i.e. is made of matter; arose through material processes in their own universe) does not meet four of Aquinas's "five ways" — unmoved mover, first cause, necessary being, or maximum degree of goodness.

My personal belief is that if there is a "god", he is quite probably much like a video game programmer, who can set up a universe like an MMO and let it run "infinitely" in "real-time", but, being constrained to a similar time-scale as the "players", is unable to make a large number of fine-grained adjustments to local variables at the immediate behest of said players (i.e. "answering prayers").

Given that all the 'players' are running in the universe in question, being able to make a large number of fine-grained adjustments to local variables in an instant (in-universe time) is simple; simply pause the simulation.

...unless some of you out there are actually players from outside the universe, in which case the rest of us would appreciate a hint.

My personal belief is that if there is a "god", he is quite probably much like a video game programmer, who can set up a universe like an MMO and let it run "infinitely" in "real-time", but, being constrained to a similar time-scale as the "players", is unable to make a large number of fine-grained adjustments to local variables at the immediate behest of said players (i.e. "answering prayers").

This seems to unreasonably deviate from the way almost every type of simulation I've ever heard of works. You can pause/resume, you can increase/decrease the "timesteps" to make the world go "faster" (with larger quanta levels though), or you could just arbitrarily increase the raw processing speed of the machine running the simulation to make the ratio of simulated vs external time proportionally higher.

Of course, if what you're proposing instead is that our "minds" are actually outside the simulation and sending input into it, rather than being fully contained within the simulation, then yes, the real-time constraint does apply.

ETA: In the latter case, I would argue that the term "Virtual Reality" is more appropriate and the use of "simulation" here is misleading and prone to conflating or confusing the two scenarios.

Hell, if the mathematical universe hypothesis is correct, then somewhere out there in the universe there is, with no intelligent priors, a collection of particles in the form of a computer, simulating a universe containing intelligent entities.

If you give people a definition of "god" which technically includes things outside the usual conception of god, they're probably going to continue operating by the standard definitions of the term. Even if I believed we were living in a simulation, I wouldn't believe in "god," because it would be laden with so many misleading associations inapplicable to what I actually believed.

Right, just saw that, my bad.

Maybe it's the cognitive dissonance, because a good rationalist shouldn't believe in a god?

I still don't see how that follows. Rationality can show that certain potential gods very probably don't exist (e.g. Thor), but I think that's as far as it goes.