My early experiences with Minecraft absolutely helped get me to this point in my career. Minecraft is less a video game and more a sandbox and development platform. Redstone is a fabulous introduction to concepts that are applicable to programming, electrical engineering, and really any logic-oriented field. I first learned Forth through a Minecraft mod, and my first technical documentation experience came from writing docs for people to use that Forth system. I later picked up Lua through ComputerCraft, and my earliest real Java projects that I built were Minecraft mods.

All of which is to say: I'm totally going to introduce my kids to Minecraft when they're old enough! I wouldn't trade the hours I spent on that game and in its community for anything.