MineCraft Alpha was built with logic-circuit design in mind [1]. This guy built a pretty extreme example, but it's not any more "unexpected and novel" than, say, making a very large castle.
If it wasn't I'm not sure how promoting Minecraft is a "net gain"... certainly encouraging more people to play video games is hardly an especially worthy goal.
Hackers that play video games want to learn and try out different things with the game, not only play it. I myself am really interested in how the game is saved (How chunks is designed, etc.) and is now currently studying linearly interpolated 3d perlin noise on my spare time because that's how Minecraft design the dynamic world.
Hackers that have decrypted or learned how the game is saved will make tools to ease work, and/or to visually view their world, or to see it from a different perspective.
Minecraft has made hackers design map-editors, cartograms and other things, including a 16-bit ALU in-game.
Making programs and learning how stuff works is a net gain for the community.
encouraging more people to play video games is hardly an especially worthy goal
Neither is Facebook, Twitter, most of the development we talk about here, or basically a million other things, but doing things to push the boundaries of what we know are.
Agreed. Which is why this was the time to make my comment. He's obviously a smart person and this has value because of the learning potential. If I had commented on the Sim City guy, it would have been taking a cheap personal shot. Didn't want to do that.
SimCity guy spent years on his city. I don't know how long this guy spent, but it can't have been nearly that long since the game is only a year or so old. It probably took some reasonable number of hours -- probably less than the average Minecraft player spends playing Minecraft without producing anything that anyone ever wants to look at.
Secondly, SimCity guy was trying to get the highest possible score within the parameters of the game as defined, which is less creative than this guy who is using the game in an unexpected and novel way.