When I was a 3rd grader, back in 2002, I had a chance to play a stunningly unique videogame at the time called "The Sims". It was basically a game about life itself, in which the player could even simulate the daily routines of themselves. This "life simulator", compared to other AAA titles, was so drastically original back in those days. One could build their own houses, virtual human beings with customizable personalities, as well as their own narratives by fancying imaginary storylines over the top of the apparent gameplay.
I played The Sims for quite a long time throughout my school years, during which I tried all sorts of meta-game features of it because one of the major downsides of The Sims was that its core gameplay tended to be a bit too repetitive and boring. Those included:
(1) Downloading custom items (e.g. user-made furniture, etc) from the internet and applying them to the game,
(2) Building houses and sharing them with other players (inside a web forum),
(3) Making cartoons by taking in-game screenshots and adding captions to them,
(4) Working as a staff member in one of The Sims fan community websites (i.e. managing user accounts, etc),
and so on.
The Sims, by nature, was a highly customizable game. One could introduce new items, houses, textures, soundtracks, and skins to the game simply by adding files to the game's directory, instead of going through any extraneous processes. Hence the availability of external tools (such as SimPose) further allowed users to create their own unique contents based off of The Sims.
The Sims occupied a special place of my youth, since it served as an inanimate mentor which ultimately guided me to become who I am today. It inspired me to first explore other kindred simulation games made by Maxis, which in turn introduced me to the notion that a videogame could potentially come out not just as a manually sculpted piece of entertainment, but also as a generic "engine of the universe" upon which players could build their own narratives.
Eventually, this early experience led me to study engineering and later on become a full-time game developer.
I hadn't really had an opportunity to work on an engineering-heavy simulation game during my early career years (I mostly worked on casual mobile games), but such hidden potentials of the game industry have always been the major source of inspiration to me. This oftentimes drove me to write code that had a tendency to be overly generic (aka "abstract"), which some people probably did not like because it lacked immediate applicability in specific gameplay scenarios, yet it was never due to some form of intellectual snobbery; rather, it was due to my heart's commitment to explore as much breadth of the game's possibility space.