I used to play Solace (a Dragonlance-based MUD) a lot from when I was 13 and for many years after. Looking back now, it helped me immensely with learning Englis

I used to play Solace (a Dragonlance-based MUD) a lot from when I was 13 and for many years after. Looking back now, it helped me immensely with learning English as a foreign language and taught me to type very fast, so it was quite useful in a way. My parents didn’t think so, of course, since I often skipped classes in school, and then in college, to play. We didn’t have Internet at home, so I had to play with friends in an ancient Soviet computer class with CRT screen-only black-white terminals and ancient keyboards; this is how I had to leave the basics of Unix, too. Fast forward a few years, I became a lead dev/immortal for this MUD (first signed up with another friend as volunteers to fix bugs in the code by sending patches to the lead imm who couldn’t program well, but we added an obfuscated loophole allowing us to stream the codebase through mud client itself, at which point the mud’s management had to enlist us fully and then they gave it up to us) and this is how I learned programming on a large scale (dozens/hundred lines of code, iirc), C/C++, socket programming, version control - more importantly, I learned what a big codebase should not look like. Good times...