[monocasa]

This is a pretty commmon technique in video games generally referred to as "data driven design". Basically put as much of the runtime decisions that are made into a data value that can be tweaked by designers without having to ask an engineer to do it each time.

[ionforce]

Final Fantasy for the NES seems to be designed the same way. A lot of the spells are actually "call function A with strength N, call function B with strength M and flag X". And with a large enough vocabulary of functions and flags, you get fire spells, healing spells, instant death spells, protection spells, etc.

[userbinator]

It's also common in embedded systems since it makes for extremely compact code. The data basically gets used as "instructions" for an application-specific virtual machine/interpreter (which may or may not be Turing-complete - most usually aren't.)