It's quite funny to me that people are running these kind of almost scientific experiments on a fully human-generated and in principle knowable system. The reason are understandable of course but it does seem like a waste of human energy.
Theoretically, all of this information could be found in the source code, but without it gamers are left to an endless research project.
An interesting inverse of the norm is the Roguelike ADOM. Most similar games from the same time period like Angband, Nethack, and DCSS were open source, while ADOM was a free, but proprietary game. The other games' secrets were open-book, with no real secrets to speak of as the source code is scoured by players. ADOM remains sort of interesting to me as there are red herrings in even the machine code to throw off reverse engineering, and genuine secrets that open source games simply can't have. I've always appreciated that you can't simply look at the source to know everything, anyway.
I remember reading an article on the Minecraft wiki about how to achieve the slowest possible movement, which is of course a totally useless thing to do in game, but you could see someone had put a ton of thought into working out how to do it! And who's to say that your slow machine is less an expression of artistry than playing the game "right" and building castles!
These systems are large and complicated and time is finite. When it comes to analysis of a written system, there's a lot more time free-floating in the global network of users than there is in the group of a dozen, maybe a hundred, developers who wrote the engine (many of which have immediately been re-tasked to write something else).
Legal processes are enormous wastes of human energy on what are usually negative-sum games.
In only humans could cooperate.
I don’t know if this is true. Private legal disputes can be purely antagonistic.
They can also be a form of short-term adversarial long-term adaptation to new information. Court cases, on the other hand, produce precedent (irrespective of the legal system). That, too, helps guide a society through novel circumstances.