I see it less being an issue of violence, and more of an issue of conflict being the only means of resolution. It's become so pervasive, that a game where you don't fight or compete against SOMETHING is considered very weird.
As for puzzle and adventure games, have you tried Antichamber or Gone Home? Those two are among my favorite games to have come out this year.
I've been thinking about this lately, and I wonder how much of the problem is a result of the games themselves. A majority of games, and almost all "real games" (as categorized by people who identify themselves as gamers), are not only violent, but portray violence as the most straight forward way to resolve conflict.
If someone is truly engrossed in a medium where the default interpersonal resolution method is to "defeat" the opposing party by whatever rules are deemed legal by the system, it's not hard to see why every time that person is provided with an alternate viewpoint it would be met with toxic hostility.
If the only tool you have is a gun or sword, everything looks like a target or monster.
There's a pretty decent discovery mechanism. The more you rate, the closer you are to the front page. It's not perfect, but I don't think I've gotten less than, say, 50 people rating my games (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/mscottmcbee/ If you're interested).
Rate others, leave comments, and people will play your game.
Do it for yourself. Don't worry about comparing your work to others. If you make something you yourself are proud of, then what does it matter if Notch or Terry Cavanagh are participating?
I think this is mostly a reflection of tech/science reporting. Batteries are hard. They're complex with many factors into what goes into a good battery. But the moment a lab creates one with good energy density, headlines just say "Scientists create batteries 20x greater than your iPhone" without paying attention to the fact that it has 20 charging cycles before it's useless.
No, I'm not out right discrediting it, but given how little I do in web and how small most of my experiments are, I probably won't use it for a long time just because I don't need what it provides.
A lot (a majority?) of websites aren't made by people that need those things. A lot of people just want to get their ideas up on a page so they can show their friends. The thing I walked away with from the article was that PHP is still active in part because it has such a low entry point for those people, where as Rails does not.
Like you said, they're very different entities, but a lot of people can't tell or don't care about the difference.
I don't do much web development, just a product once every year or so to play around with an idea. Always in PHP. A few months ago I was asked by a close friend to help them with a not-so-serious site. I decided that I'd use Rails, because, hey, I've heard nothing but good about it from HN and the like.
I was absolutely blown away by how much work it required to get started. That, and how painful it was to explain to a non technical person how to make visual changes.
I was told by a few friends I vented to that what I was doing was "too small" of a project, or "Rails is meant for web apps" which confused me because I assumed a site where you could upload images via a form and then browse and view them was right up its alley.
Edit: A lot of comments are talking about wrapping my head around the framework, MVC, ect. I had no problem building the initial application. My sore points are more about deployments and updating smaller things, like the image of a link. non-technical people don't often remember "oh, and if you want your change to show up, go to this folder, open 'restart.txt' and change it in some way. doesn't matter what, just add a space to the end".
What would you call the middle ground between the two of them? I feel like I spend a lot of time reading, but I just can't bring myself to blog. I've had one for years that has maybe 5 posts. It's a combination of being tired at the end of the day, feeling like I have nothing useful to say (that hasn't already been said), and generally not thinking about it.
It's also a similar story with Stack Overflow. When I think to try and answer questions, they've already been answered by people more knowledgeable than me.
Ok, that makes me feel better. I've been watching and waiting for Windows support to get better, and I'd hate to have it fizzle before I really got to play with it.
>If Servo (written in Rust) isn't faster than Gecko (written in C++), then Mozilla won't continue funding Rust. Rust needs to be fast in a very existential way.
Ouch, I didn't know the project had a deadline. By when does it need to be faster?