I find it very interesting that a singular game can expand towards it community, creating something of an another layer of play, where the game can be treated as a sort of tool for meta-experiments, experience sharing and so on and so forth. Although you might not understand what I mean right now, give me a moment. Every game can be technically speedrun, which creates such a community and such an environment where people are sharing completely new ways to play the game, and sharing tricks and knowledge competing in different types of challenges that become a part of the game itself although it was not intended to. The searching of bugs, exploits as well as ways to play the game quicker becomes a second layer of the game, which expands it's scope a lot, creating the community, because of which the game stops being treated as just a game, and starts being treated as a living environment in which people can experiment, fuck around with, share experiences in the example of speedrunning, stories about good and bad runs or videos of such, and even create new games on the basis of that game.
But here is the thing, this isn't limited to speedrunning, and there are lots of games that have perfect qualities to create such environments. Let's take Minecraft for example, completely removing the multiplayer aspect of the game which always gives the game an ability to create a meta-environment no matter what game is presented, we can see that a community could be formed around the game by:
>Creating new challenges for runs
>Sharing the stories that happen in the game
>Sharing the creations that people make
>Trying to find new and effective ways to farm items
>Creating new creations, and discovering ways to abuse the game mechanics to add new layers to the game ie: flying machines
And much, much more, and that is not counting multiplayer. Although this seems very obvious, there are video games that are simply not very well adjusted to creating such environments, for example something like Dwarf Fotress would have such an expansive meta-environment and Dishonored, lacks such besides a speedrunning scene. My question then is, what are the properties of the games which create communities that treat their games as living environments? What other games are examples of that? Why are they examples of that? What was the most fun thing that came out of those environments? What exactly allows for creation of expansive meta-environments.