>The full blown computers running in Minecraft has made me hope for more games that make computation an integrated part of game mechanics.
You know, speaking of which, I actually learned FORTH from Minecraft.
Years ago, there was a now-defunct mod, Redpower 2, that massively expanded on the game's existing redstone mechanics. Redstone wires that could be run on walls and ceilings, insulated wires, bundled cables that carried 16 signals in parallel, a plethora of single-block logic gates, and a huge array of added features like the motorized "frames" that let you move huge constructions all at once, or the sophisticated pneumatic-tube networks for moving, routing, and sorting items. It was hugely popular; many features it introduced worked themselves so deeply into the modded community that clones copying many of its mechanics would remain popular to this day.
And one of the things it added, in one update, was a computer - specifically, an emulated custom 6502 variant (the 65EL02) with 8K of RAM (expandable to 64K), and a boot disk for a FORTH-based operating system to run on it. (Some dedicated users did code up other operating systems; someone ported BASIC to the thing, although it took up an awful lot of that limited memory)
Nobody had ever seen anything like it in the modded community, and a lot of children (including me) made at least a nominal effort to learn some basic FORTH so we could build things like password-locked doors, or pilot frame-based flying machines to do useful things like quarry out half the world and deliver it to our doorstep. Lots of more advanced stuff got built, too - 3D printers, computer-controlled automatic crafting systems, teleporters with selectable destinations.
The Redpower computers ended up not terribly popular, in the end - FORTH, being a language from 1970 that nobody had heard of before and which didn't look much like anything else most Minecraft players had ever used, proved a pretty intimidating barrier to entry; and shortly after Redpower introduced their feature someone else made their own mod that added Lua-based computers with a much less barebones OS and friendlier ways of interacting with useful functionality. This had a much easier time taking off.
You know, speaking of which, I actually learned FORTH from Minecraft.
Years ago, there was a now-defunct mod, Redpower 2, that massively expanded on the game's existing redstone mechanics. Redstone wires that could be run on walls and ceilings, insulated wires, bundled cables that carried 16 signals in parallel, a plethora of single-block logic gates, and a huge array of added features like the motorized "frames" that let you move huge constructions all at once, or the sophisticated pneumatic-tube networks for moving, routing, and sorting items. It was hugely popular; many features it introduced worked themselves so deeply into the modded community that clones copying many of its mechanics would remain popular to this day.
And one of the things it added, in one update, was a computer - specifically, an emulated custom 6502 variant (the 65EL02) with 8K of RAM (expandable to 64K), and a boot disk for a FORTH-based operating system to run on it. (Some dedicated users did code up other operating systems; someone ported BASIC to the thing, although it took up an awful lot of that limited memory)
Nobody had ever seen anything like it in the modded community, and a lot of children (including me) made at least a nominal effort to learn some basic FORTH so we could build things like password-locked doors, or pilot frame-based flying machines to do useful things like quarry out half the world and deliver it to our doorstep. Lots of more advanced stuff got built, too - 3D printers, computer-controlled automatic crafting systems, teleporters with selectable destinations.
The Redpower computers ended up not terribly popular, in the end - FORTH, being a language from 1970 that nobody had heard of before and which didn't look much like anything else most Minecraft players had ever used, proved a pretty intimidating barrier to entry; and shortly after Redpower introduced their feature someone else made their own mod that added Lua-based computers with a much less barebones OS and friendlier ways of interacting with useful functionality. This had a much easier time taking off.