It’s just a tool, like a search engine or a guillotine

The first level of MegaMan x and good springs in fallout: New Vegas are really good examples of how to convey info to the player about how the game works and what you can do without pulling you out of the game itself into a separate tutorial

Why use age instead of a knowledge check instead?

It’s not a back door, it’s just a rear entryway

It’s been interesting seeing the changes as they happened over time working with java pretty often for a good chunk of that time. The jvm and jit performance improvements, syntax changes and additional jep features added vs what was left out, tools for running and managing jvms, Sun & Oracle shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly, new jvm languages with scala, groovy, clojure, etc and their impact on java. I prefer other languages and tool chains for some cases, but java has been pretty good for building reliable, upgradable, extendable systems that get the job done & have a good large stable library.