Yes. It lets me see my sister in Austin without either of us needing to buy a plane ticket with money we don’t have. Not as good as face-to-face visiting, but vastly better than voice only calling.
It’s also come in handy for troubleshooting my extremely technophobic mother’s tech problems when her computer is not able to connect to the internet (when it can connect, I just use teamviewer to go in and see what’s gone wrong). Although I still can’t get her to stop turning the phone around when she wants to show me something - touching the button to switch to the rear facing camera is one of the many, many things that she has trouble wrapping her head around.
ETA:
You mean the way the other person is always looking down away from the camera? A trivial annoyance that is more than made up for by the ability to see someone you care about without having to physically travel to them.
You remember the Hangouts part of Google Plus? That got used, a ton, by tabletop gamers playing pen and paper RPGs with their online friends. Organize a pick up game using IMs in Plus, then jump onto a group hangout and invade the Caves of Chaos with half a dozen strangers over the internet. Now that Google is shutting down Plus and Hangouts, I suspect some of those games will start being organized using imessage and played over group facetime calls.
Here’s the original info for FLAILSNAILS, rules enabling D&D pick up games over google Hangouts:
