It's pretty obvious it was designed for a smartphone just by seeing the word "tap" as soon as you open it.
Viewing it on desktop was an awful experience, mainly because of the background videos taking up the whole browser window and no ability to adjust the volume
I think average office people don't know how to use A/C and heating well.
Every time I work in an office with a large and diverse enough population I have to endure stuffy warm air in winter and being blasted by cold wind in summer.
I find it ridiculous, but, while wearing shorts, a t-shirt and sandals outside I have to keep a hoodie at my desk just to survive the office summer.
One of my hobbies is music, I play in a live rock band and frequently meet other bands. A feature of fellow amateur musicians that stands out the most to me is how often they are dismissive and snobbish towards other musicians. I've been in bands and amateur musicians' circles in two very different countries, and people in both had this thing going on! It's bizarre.
And coming on to the next point...
>Tech has an asshole problem, and maybe there's correlation between people who are technically good, but emotionally abusive or lacking in empathy.
I've seen this behavior from people that are pretty proficient at their instruments more often than from newbies, too!
Some projects have adopted donation systems with different grades of success. However this really requires having a combination of factors to work out, such as people actually needing the product, developers not being toxic in communication, the project and developers actually being around for some time to gather a dedicated following.
Nintendo keeps providing excellent gaming experience that no one else does. Super Mario Odyssey is awesome not because it's the same old Mario guy from NES, but because it is just a great game.
Nintendo games are not polluted by the games-as-service and free-to-play monetization mindsets as badly as other platforms.
I don't like a lot of their rigidity, such as takedowns or still not getting rid of having stuff segregated by regions, but I appreciate what they contribute to the world of video games.
I was a pretty active competitive player in Street Fighter 4 in my local scene. I spent a lot of time learning intricate things about the game. I knew so many different situations that could happen in the game, and due to my experience I was able to come up with appropriate responses. Those are the things that can't be learned from a video tutorial or a written guide, because they are simply too minute. As an example, some of the longer combos can have their later hits miss if you start out too far from the opponent. But the fine line between close enough and too far is very hard to gauge.
Then Street Fighter 5 came out, and all that accumulated knowledge had to be thrown away. That was one of the reasons I gave up on competitive playing, couldn't really deal with going at it again only for all my knowledge to get invalidated later on once more.
Same as with any addictive thing, you can use and you can abuse. And the change isn't instant.
You can play MMO socially in a guild, or you can simply grind max levels / rare items endlessly.
You can play an IAP and ad-riddled mobile game to kill some time when waiting in queues, or you can have it become a part of your life checking the game everytime you have a minute of downtime.
And the transitions between those states happen impreceptibly, and there is no defined line beyond which you may consider the activity harmful.
>And of which the creators were as passionate about the their creation and genre as you, as opposed to cynical 'let's make another addictive MMOG' or 'let's make another FarmVille' or 'let's make Angry Birds 335' studios?
This is how I feel too. All games are addictive and have psychological "feel good" hooks in them. However it feels like a lot of those scummy mobile games prioritize engineering addiction and exploiting those hooks over making a fun game. Add to that recent controversies about some games being considered gambling which, as an industry, shares this goal of making people addicted to the rush so that they spend more.
What pains me the most is that it works. People vote with wallets and support these developers.
Could it be an issue local to your school / university? Frankly, I can understand many institutions using those services simply because they actually do provide convenience.
I live in Korea and haven't really noticed anything like the "have a gmail account or be excluded from life" dichotomy you have described. Not sure what "upvoting a president e-petition" is, but you don't need neither FB nor Google for voting in elections.
* switch to another activity and turn on the internet
* game prefetches an ad or even several while in the background
So next time you launch the game you'd have to see those cached ads. It's definitely better than having the game fetch and shove them in your face all the time, but still it isn't a complete solution in this case.
Viewing it on desktop was an awful experience, mainly because of the background videos taking up the whole browser window and no ability to adjust the volume