Exhibit A: A player gathers raw materials (the standard library) and crafts those materials into objects, which in turn can be crafted into still other objects. This crafting takes place on a crafting bench (the compiler). If the raw materials are not arranged precisely, the new object does not compile.
Exhibit B: A Minecraft player is highly motivated to automate aspects of their in-game life. Farming, ranching, raw material generation or mining, travel...they are all targets for a player's need to automate and scale the process. A player will spend hours building automation that will only save them the time of manually executing a function after many hours of automated execution.
Exhibit C: A multitude of wikis and Q&A sites exist to help players, or for experienced players to contribute back to the community or increase their social capital.
Exhibit D: Endless forks of game variations exist, be they custom maps, data packs, resource packs, programmatic game modifications, even the frameworks that allow for those modifications.
I'm sure I'm missing some additional examples, can you help me think of them?
What other games have analogous mechanics or aspects of gameplay or community?
Exhibit B: A Minecraft player is highly motivated to automate aspects of their in-game life. Farming, ranching, raw material generation or mining, travel...they are all targets for a player's need to automate and scale the process. A player will spend hours building automation that will only save them the time of manually executing a function after many hours of automated execution.
Exhibit C: A multitude of wikis and Q&A sites exist to help players, or for experienced players to contribute back to the community or increase their social capital.
Exhibit D: Endless forks of game variations exist, be they custom maps, data packs, resource packs, programmatic game modifications, even the frameworks that allow for those modifications.
I'm sure I'm missing some additional examples, can you help me think of them?
What other games have analogous mechanics or aspects of gameplay or community?
You did a good job of selling how similar Minecraft is to software. It's hard for me to come up with other examples.
hmm....
I have heard