[livueta]

Are there are any games they play/might be interested in that have scripting facilities of some sort?

I got into tech of various flavors by learning to write RuneScape bots circa 2005-2009. There were a few publicly available Java reflection-based bot dev kits at the time, which was my initial entry point. I later got into more advanced programming topics by figuring out how the SDKs themselves worked and rolling my own, as the widely used free ones tended to get your accounts heuristically banned quite a lot. Sysadmin stuff when I got around to setting up proper remote bot farms, etc.

My example is somewhat more ethically dubious than a lot of similar-ish stories (e.g. blizzard rts mod development, Minecraft mods, etc.) but I've always found that "pure" intros to programming tend to lack an inherent motivating factor like what you can get with messing with games, whether it's to make something cool, skip a grind or generate some pocket money.

[stebbins]

Wow, this throws me back. I had the same exact experience. Now I'm back down memory lane thinking of that forum drama...

The RuneScape botting scene was so strange. It was a really interesting subculture to be a part of. If you were ever active on JH, we probably have seen each other's posts...

[che_shirecat]

An different but related scene was the RSPS (Runescape private server) community that created replications of the game with a reverse-engineered client. Developing private server code was my first experience with programming and with backend software problem spaces like networking, concurrency/event handling, etc.

[bribri]

The very first program I wrote that did something useful was a naive runescape autominer using SCAR and pascal.