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Comment by vzhou842 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many people got into coding because of Runescape like the author... I have almost the same origin story [1] and I know a lot of people who also do.

[1] https://victorzhou.com/blog/how-i-became-a-programmer/

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Douglas Rushkoff's Cyberia (1994) has some coverage on the idea of a true hacker and the "curious" personality archetype that matches it. It was more than 10 years ago that I read it and it resonated strongly with me, so perhaps it's worth a read if you like to understand more of the psychological roots.

https://www.amazon.com/Cyberia-Trenches-Cyberspace-Douglas-R...

Great author.

Both fiction and non-fiction.

I highly recommend ‘Exit Strategy’.

I got into programming because of Runescape as well! Although my beginning was bots written in AutoHotKey that would:

1) Search screen for pixels within the color of bones

2) Pick up bones

3) Bury bones

My prayer level went through the roof! Then they implemented "sleep", a system where each action added a bit of "exhaustion" that could only be solved by walking to a bed, sleeping, and typing in a captcha in order to wake up. Killed my bots! But not my love of programming :-)

You can count me as another data point. I started taking coding seriously at around 11/12 years old, working on one of the big Runescape fansites, and very quickly lost interest in playing the game because I found coding to be more fun.

I wonder where this is happening today, for the next generation of developers. Roblox seems like a big one, are there others?

I share that sentiment. My first exposure to programming was some C++ when I was 13th but I gave up 2 months in. It was my fanaticism over playing Runescape that reintroduced me to programming through making bots with SCAR.

I was planning to introduce my kids to game development this summer. Is Gamemaker still the best platform to introduce kids to game dev? My kids know a bit of scratch...

Similar story here, though I was more into the IRC servers used by runescapers to communicate, and creating IRC bots and the like

I started mine in writing autohotkey scripts for MMO's / DoTA and making custom maps with starcraft

Similar for me, but custom maps in wc3 instead.

I was heavily involved in the private server scene in the late 2000s :-)

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