Why are we getting hung-up on Minecraft? One can define sand-box so vaguely that almost any game could be argued as one. That doesn't take us to a useful or productive place, imo. The fact is, those were examples (mostly) of emergent gameplay, rather than what is conventionally thought of as sandbox gameplay. They weren't "experimenting with ruleset to produce different outcomes" gameplay (beyond the fact that you can argue almost ANY gameplay can be described in these terms), they were "me and my buddies are going to hunt down this guy with a bounty" gameplay - i.e. gameplay which emerges from people interacting with one another within the game-world.
I would characterise an example of sandbox gameplay as, say, trying to pile ships up on a planets surface, or trying to use momentum exchange from weapons fire to manoeuvre - something like that.
That said, this is all academic! What does it matter what a sandbox is? You can define it to be one thing, and elite fits that description, and perhaps a whole load of people don't want to play it. Better we talk about what elite IS itself, rather than argue about what the words some people use to describe it mean.
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