I remember when Notch was playing with this space game with a slimed down assembly language he created. He stopped working on it unfortunately, but I still think there's a whole potential genre of hacking on a game. Not a "press F" to hack, but a legit log into this system, get/change whatever. Having a legit in-game OS seems like a good step forward.
Factorio has a mod where you can program electricity circuits using assembly, I forgot the name. You place a "computer facility", connect to the signal network, then open a terminal to start programming.
It's pretty cool because factories can be very complex, giving it real utility. And you can communicate over the wire with fair sophistication using items as signal symbols. The clock speed of the devices was limited to a few instructions per game tick.
At what point does it start looking too much like your real job? Zachatronics game Shenzen had that problem for some friends of mine that do chip design professionally.
Bitburners does a pretty good job. Its an idle game with fairly limited "OS" emulation, but the best solutions require real thought and programming knowledge.
You'll be writing scripts to scan the net for open ports, automatically "hack" into them, then globally balance allocate memory between all of them according to certain parameters to make the hack the most "profitable". You'll be writing elementary socket communications, building scripts to feed analytics back to your home PC, even alogirthmic trading in a fake stock market. I had fun with it.
