I wonder how many people got into coding because of Runescape like the author... I have almost the same origin story [1] and I know a lot of people who also do.
Douglas Rushkoff's Cyberia (1994) has some coverage on the idea of a true hacker and the "curious" personality archetype that matches it. It was more than 10 years ago that I read it and it resonated strongly with me, so perhaps it's worth a read if you like to understand more of the psychological roots.
I got into programming because of Runescape as well! Although my beginning was bots written in AutoHotKey that would:
1) Search screen for pixels within the color of bones
2) Pick up bones
3) Bury bones
My prayer level went through the roof! Then they implemented "sleep", a system where each action added a bit of "exhaustion" that could only be solved by walking to a bed, sleeping, and typing in a captcha in order to wake up. Killed my bots! But not my love of programming :-)
You can count me as another data point. I started taking coding seriously at around 11/12 years old, working on one of the big Runescape fansites, and very quickly lost interest in playing the game because I found coding to be more fun.
I wonder where this is happening today, for the next generation of developers. Roblox seems like a big one, are there others?
I share that sentiment. My first exposure to programming was some C++ when I was 13th but I gave up 2 months in. It was my fanaticism over playing Runescape that reintroduced me to programming through making bots with SCAR.
I was planning to introduce my kids to game development this summer. Is Gamemaker still the best platform to introduce kids to game dev? My kids know a bit of scratch...
[1] https://victorzhou.com/blog/how-i-became-a-programmer/