I have to give pause and give a shout out to my computer gaming past: a create your own world RPG style game called the Adventure Construction Set, made in the mid 1980s by Stuart Smith for Electronic Arts.

In addition to exploring the preloaded and prebuilt worlds, once you got a flavor for it, you could open up a back-end module and start building worlds of your own, one low-res monochrome Apple //e pixel at a time. You also got a taste for immortality if you could navigate your way through the character creation menus.

I actually learned the word, "melee" because of ACS because that was one of two weapon classes (melee weapons and missile weapons). For melee, the glory of battlefield victory was in each close quarters click of the joystick (you'd get a terse verbal description of what was going down in the combat zone). For a missile weapon, a large, flickering bulb would blink from your avatar to the intended target.

Not quite the WoW of today, but much more than battlefield construction, it was truly adventure constructing, one blocky piece of terrain, one text line of treasure at a time.