When I was in middle school, I thought SC's trigger-based map editor was the most amazing thing ever. I even built a four-mission mini campaign that I showed my friends, who promptly told me that it sucked. (It was actually pretty terrible, although fun to make.) That, and collecting UMS maps and putting them on my GeoCities page.
The incredible part is, DotA started out as a Warcraft 3 custom map. Hell, there's still a version being maintained by the developers at Valve which largely maintains feature parity with DotA 2.
Oddly enough, battle.net itself is what got me into computers. There was a vibrant hacking community that existed back in the day, and watching all those older kids do cool stuff got me interested in software.
Oh yeah! I don't know about now though, it sure used to be.
I didn't do anything fancy, just some basic bot automation and a couple miscellaneous chatbox-based addons (mostly for spamming) but it got me learning Lua.
I used to play Tibia when I was around 12-15 and I started hosting my own server, since I wanted to make some unique quests for the people that used my server I started modifying Lua files then writing some of my own.
To me it always read like plain English (and English isn't my mother language). In fact I'd say I even learnt some English from reserved words (like If).
