Understood. I just don't see why you believe it's better even when it's simulated building. This sort of thing seems amazing to me, but not necessarily praiseworthy.
All of our educational methods are built around simulations and constrained, simplified problems. We don't ask first-year undergraduates to go out and start working on real-world projects immediately. Some of them can manage with sink-or-swim methods, but there's a lot of benefit to be had from a trivial context - it's like the difference between learning to trade stocks on paper(risk-free intellectual challenge) and putting real money out there(psychological stress, real world consequences). If you raise the stakes immediately, you may defeat the learning process.
And most of the people doing these kinds of things, are, unsurprisingly, around college age.
I don't think it is, in the same way. There are some languages and environments, though, that would seem very much like this. For example, if you were to reimplement the a linux kernel driver in the Whitespace programming language, it would almost perfectly analogous to this, except that it couldn't be removed by the failure of the implementor of the Whitespace interpreter.
I have no actual criticism of doing this -- I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do. Instead, I'm saying that aside from benefits like aiding learning (separated out by the initial comment regarding good:/bad:), it's just a method of creating the sensation of having built something without anything having really been built, and thus it's very much pure entertainment, like watching TV.
I feel like everyone is trying to drill down into why I feel that having fun is bad or wrong or why I don't enjoy it, when I've repeatedly said I don't feel that way.
kiba: I think building is still a lot better than watching though.
The original point to which I was replying, lest we forget, was that building something (even something which is explicitly ephemeral) was "better than" mere entertainment like watching TV. The commenter didn't say that he liked it more, or that he was more entertained by pretending to build than by watching TV. He said he thought it was better to pretend to build than to watch TV. I merely asked why, but no one has actually offered an explanation.
Why should I regard building this ALU, or building a full-scale mockup of the Enterprise D to pick another Minecraft example I saw yesterday, as a better form of entertainment (presuming the same entertainment utility, I guess) than watching TV? What reasons are there to say, "Playing Minecraft for X hours is a better use of your time than regularly watching television"?
It seems to me that they're basically equivalent (leaving aside the learning component as the original commenter did when he spoke of building), and I'm confused that there seem to be a bunch of people who feel that it's more morally upstanding or something about playing Minecraft than watching TV.
So if we can both assume that things are only better or worse in context, maybe we can look for ideas there.
My attempt: If we looked at a mincraft player and a television watcher's brains under an MRI, I can imagine people exercising more decision making and critical thinking areas of their brain while planning buildings and playing in minecraft. I assume in the hacker context people value those forms of mental play more than passive television staring.
