I have close friends from a TF2 community server that's been dead for over a decade now, but I can't think of anyone I've met via random matchmaking since.
Game servers are the perfect digital third space, it starts off with random players but as you log in each night, you see more and more familiar faces pop up and before you know it you're all regulars popping in to chat while playing a few rounds, learning more about your new friends and praying to god that you've got the godlike Finnish sniper player on your team.
By comparison, modern matchmaking-lead multiplayer feels gentrified and - for lack of a better term - soulless. You're blindly shuffled between random players each game, and there's no way to properly build a connection with players or a community out of it. There's a vacuous and temporary nature to it all that just feels cold.
Edit: also the fact that things like skins & sprays - player controlled ways of expressing themselves - have been neatly packaged by gamedevs and sold back to players at a premium. It feels completely antithetical to the player-led nature of what such games used to be.
Codemasters being the company who made the Game Genie AND the best racing games out there is a square I've never been able to circle. It feels a tad unreal for me.
One of those studios that's always had massive talent, although I'm increasingly concerned about their future as EA tightens their grip on them.
Most anti-cheats will immediately kick/ban someone from a game if it detects certain applications or hooks. Good for removing cheaters, but that gives cheat devs immediate feedback that something in their cheat has triggered it – they'll modify the cheat, try again, then see if it's detected or not.
VAC is designed around obscurity. When it detects a cheat it flags the account, and then an indeterminate amount of time later it/Valve bans all the flagged accounts. It makes it much harder for cheat devs to figure out what exactly flagged VAC, but the lack of an immediate ban means that normal players are still putting up with cheaters day in day out.
Another caveat is that VAC only bans you from the game engine. So you could get VAC banned from Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source, yet still be free to hack on Counter-Strike 2.
Also considering how many of Valve's titles are free, there's no wonder why hacks are so prolific in their games.
I'll always be amazed at how Skype went from being top dog in 2010 to not even being considered a choice in 2020. How did Microsoft drop the ball so hard that when the Pandemic rolled around everyone decided to use the then-unheard of Zoom instead?
Taking a general public lens here. For vidya, Teamspeak/Mumble provided better quality & latency but Skype remained king for its ease of ad-hoc calls until Discord blew it out of the water.
Skype was built on p2p for 2000s internet. It was great technology at the time, but completely wrong choice for 2010s with smartphones and huge chat groups.
If we went back in time the only way to truly save skype would be to basically make discord and gradually replace skype with it, keeping the userbase. This would be way harder than just making discord because migration is harder that writing from scratch and getting that migration approved in a corporate setting is insanely hard.
Worth mentioning that despite mentioning kids in the title, the examples in the article include multiple cases of adults at the time who were also struggling . Pointing at smartphones and overly-simplified UIs is valid, but that still doesn't answer all of it – and the answers we have for ourselves won't fit with the present experience.
When I was young, the computer in the back room was monolithic and offered an infinite amount of interaction compared to all the other devices I owned, and it was natural that I'd find myself returning to it over and over again. But with the abundance of screens and connectivity in today's world, that sheer wonder & curiosity would probably be lessened for today's children.
The family PC as an institution was key as well. A broad sandbox for children to mess around in and gain an idea as to how things worked from an early age, and the cost of it [usually] being the only PC in the house meant that adults had to seriously learn how to set up & maintain it as well as teach us how to use it. But this was supplanted and atomised by cheaper laptops when Vista rolled around, then rendered non-existent in the era of smartphones.
> There are always one or two kids in every cohort that have already picked up programming or web development or can strip a computer down to the bare bones
I feel like of all things, this is mostly nurtured by PC gaming. You naturally learn about tweaking settings, installation locations, hardware, config files, troubleshooting issues, and if you're creative or have an apt for programming then you can find yourself making your own game mods. I've heard from Gen Z friends how they got their start learning to port forward so they could run a Minecraft server with their mates!
A lot of computer literacy parallels between today's 15-to-30 year olds and the 45+ folks around me when I grew up engrossed in computing. They're making the same mistakes, having trouble with the same kinds of things, and lack the same mental models that the "old people" lacked back when I was growing up.
Really with a lack of resources (and the relative safety & time available), off the wall thinking became the standard for British researchers throughout the war – to the point where it practically became policy. Not all of it worked, but considering the challenges faced it's amazing how novel some of the solutions were.
I've been stuck down the Casio modding rabbit hole as of late. I knew filling the watch with oil ('hydro-mod') lead to a crisper display with better viewing angles and increased water resistance, but to see a watch with minor splash resistance operate as such depths is insane.
Worth mentioning some drawbacks before you get your precision screwdrivers out. Doing it will make your watch get stupidly hot in the sun, the process can be messy, and sometimes certain mechanisms/features can break as a result of it. Best to check what others have done before you.
The back will get hot since the oil improves the heat transfer from the front to the back. The sun will always heat the front, but as long as the heat transfer rate to the back is low enough it won't feel hot - your body will absorb the heat and reach an equilibrium temperature which feels natural.
Game servers are the perfect digital third space, it starts off with random players but as you log in each night, you see more and more familiar faces pop up and before you know it you're all regulars popping in to chat while playing a few rounds, learning more about your new friends and praying to god that you've got the godlike Finnish sniper player on your team.
By comparison, modern matchmaking-lead multiplayer feels gentrified and - for lack of a better term - soulless. You're blindly shuffled between random players each game, and there's no way to properly build a connection with players or a community out of it. There's a vacuous and temporary nature to it all that just feels cold.
Edit: also the fact that things like skins & sprays - player controlled ways of expressing themselves - have been neatly packaged by gamedevs and sold back to players at a premium. It feels completely antithetical to the player-led nature of what such games used to be.