A lot of it had to do with creatively told stories about the events in a playthrough, particularly with some succession games - games passed along to others after a set time elapses. The first one I'm aware of is Boatmurdered:
We're working on a fairly different model at https://rundexter.com - right now it's a bit light on the programming constructs (we only have a switch statement and a very primitive loop), but very strong on data flow and data binding. If you don't want to sign up, you can see the basics in use at 0:45 of the homepage video. We looked at things like Snap and Blockly early on and agreed that they weren't satisfactory.
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Bloodline:Boatmurdere...