Hey! That’s so nice!
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“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” is looking a lot like an obsolete pre-internet concept. Ignoring a few shrieking teenagers may be relatively easy. Ignoring ten thousand people flooding all your mailboxes with slurs and the odd death threat for weeks on end is a different thing entirely.
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I think we can, we just can’t expect to learn how they are made 
I really enjoyed the level Valve released that had a commentary explaining how the developers used design elements to keep the players on track while giving the impression of a open(ish) environment.
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Its like development anywhere. If anybody is being ripped off, its not by the devs. Its the people higher in the supply chain who sell the products.
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Jesus. So fucking much this.
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That one’s never been true, and the sooner people give up on the whole miserable idea, the better. It misses entirely on the impact of social and emotional abuse and bullying, and – at worst – serves as a ready-made excuse for victim-blaming: “If you just didn’t let the bullies get at you, you wouldn’t have any problems! (So it’s really your fault, and not the fault of those other kids who keep calling you fat, ugly and stupid.)”
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well lets see in one case the driver b0rk3d the server for having the /PAE switch and it wasn’t documented.
and in the current case we will be keeping w2k8r2 around cause it won’t run on w2k16 as far as I am told anyway.
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I am currently addicted to No Man’s Sky. I bought it after the 3rd update, so I can’t speak on how it was at launch, but it’s pretty much hitting all my buttons–easily the most absorbing game I’ve played in years.
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I’m currently in the last stretch of the game, trying to save up to buy a freighter, get the last few recipes and tech I haven’t found, and I need the upgrades for my ship’s warp engine so I can visit certain sun colored systems. I quite enjoy the game, still hoping for true co-op.
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Adding things like multiplayer, missions, crafting, etc have made the game better and better with each update. It’d have been great if some of those things were there a year ago, but it’s pretty terrific, and it’s currently eating the lives of the housemates.
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Drivers are tricky. In Windows at least no easy way to migrate a device driver from 32 to 64 bit. Another complication is you need to get your driver signed and that costs money. If you want your driver distributed through Windows Update then you need to get it certified as well.
So, yeah, time, effort, and money. If the hardware is old and out of support, there’s really no incentive for the device maker to build new drivers.
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I’ve often wished for games to be the opposite of a power fantasy. Where you’re clearly not the most capable person to be involved, or the smartest, etc. but you’re doing what you can. I have played some games over the years that dabble in this and it makes the experience more interesting. Some Japanese games tend to go into this more because to some extent its part of their culture, where all you can hope for is to give something your best. Western games rarely put protagonists in position where they aren’t a white space christ.
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I’ve worked 10-18 hour days at an insurance company and was paid for every hour. I’ve worked similar for DOD contractors and was generally paid for every hour (never time and a half though). I worked at a startup stupid amount of hours in exchange for equity (should have stayed at the insurance company the employee stock purchase plan was a better deal and they did a 401k). I’m back to working on DOD projects and I haven’t worked more than 40 hours in a week in over 4 years. I still idly dream of working on my own games. Sometimes it’s more than idle dreams but having talked to people who worked for EA, I’m still content working on my boring ass enterprise applications/services/web sites and having free time.
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I was programming 64 bit machines full time in the late 1980s, early 90s. 
Word. I worked pretty hard to control my kids’ gaming right until they started attending High School. My policy was “no games that train you to murder strangers at the behest of uniformed authority figures” and “no sadism or masochism” and just simple stuff like that.
And I used to mock their games that let you survive being sprayed with bullets. Most of the popular games are like cheap horror films, the amount of damage a human can take is determined by the plot or lack thereof…
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I tend to agree. I have a nephew who would ONLY play games in god mode. My gaming friends and I (ages 40+) will NEVER play in god mode. To each his own, I guess, but when I finish a game, I want to feel like I’ve accomplished something, even if it’s not important.
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While i play a large amount of games that feature violence, i honestly would like to see more games that does not resort to violence as the default solution. Or have any violence at all to solve problems and drive the plot forward.
There’s technically a good variety of games like this but generally they haven’t been games that i’ve been terribly interested in. No Man’s Sky is one of the few games that has little violence (though i wish it were possible to complete without resorting to it at all). The plot also doesn’t call for boss battles and gun fights which is a huge plus in my book.
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I’ve done this for select games, and rarely. But i did it for large portions of Half Life 1 and HL2 episodes because i found certain sections really obnoxious to survive through so i would toggle God mode so i could get to the interesting parts where the action was slowed way down and i could focus on the plot. These days seldomly toggle cheats on, but if forced to i will just so that i can enjoy the game.
Hmmm, thinking about it the majority of the cheats that i do use is in RPGs like Fallout. I will typically set my carry weight to something ridiculous so i don’t have to micromanage my inventory and carry weight. It’s really damn annoying.
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That’s why I stick to the (relatively new) genre of online coop games like Destiny, L4D, The Division, etc. where players are incentivized to work together.
You still get those guys in the PvP modes of course. I had a PvP match last week (which my team of rando’s won, btw), and I got an abusive message telling me I sucked. Seems to me that the mods of both XBL and PSN are pretty good at responding to reports of abuse.
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I’m trying to think of such games. Banished is one. Space Colony has some missions like that. City Builders in general. Rocket League, I suppose. Maybe puzzle games or Japanese graphic novel games, but I don’t own any. Really.
Edit to add: Oh, yeah, World of Goo. Good game.
Of course, those are the games that get brigaded hard on stream.
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