I don’t think I’ve ever met a cheater in any of those games (it was more than 15 years ago). And if I did, since it was one of the more active servers, there was usually an admin available. I don’t remember it being an issue.

I a large part of my childhood, around age like 9-12, playing SW: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy multiplayer. Hanging out on a JAVA server with people I met over there, being part of a clan with regular practice that attended tournaments, but most of the fun was just chilling on the server, exploring the plethora of custom maps filled with secrets, and having a great time.

The experience is something I can’t imagine in this day and age, epsecialy because matchmaking killed this kind of friendship between random players, and most of the social aspects of games. All of the Free For All servers were mostly about just chilling, with combat only done in agreed-upon duels that had it’s own unwritten rules/etiquette that everyone respected. The community was amazing.

What drove the point home for me was seeing a Twitter account (it was years ago) that posts short 6 second segments of every new game released on steam.

It was posting almost hourly, and while there was a lot of trash, most of the games were of pretty “standart” smaller indie quallity. It’s ruthless.

And in addition with the GDC talk of someone who made literally millions by making a generator that generates super basic slot machine games on various themes (as in, generate a theme (cars, bird…), download a few pictures, place them on slot machine) and uploads them to Play Store (back then you had a limit on 20 games a day, and they did include some more rules about quality in reaction to this talk), and the game were getting thousands of downloads and when they checked how is their script doing after few months, they had like over a million in revenue IIRC. Sure, it’s about mobile games, but it is hearbreaking when you realize how do the consumers work in reality.

I think it’s time to stop and think whether we really need all of those services? We’ve been slowly trapped into social networks and various unecessary services through dark patterns, and now we somehow can’t imagine being without them, even though they actively make everything worse.

What was the last time you watched a Youtube video that actually was worth the time, and wasn’t just a shallow content about something vaguely interesting, but something you’ll probably could live without? Do we really need to agregate news and articles from the whole internet, while there probably are good local newspaper/news sites that will get you up to speed, without giving you clickbait articles? For example, we have a pretty great news company that is independent and funded entierly by users, and it’s enough for keeping up to speed on world events without having to scroll through a lot of bullshit.

The more enshitificated the internet gets, the more I’m starting to realize that I really don’t need almost any of it. Sure, some things are pretty usefull, like cloud storage, but almost anything I needed so far was solved by just getting a NAS with Nextcloud. The only thing I really need the internet for is messaging and email. And if I want to stay up to date, we have amazing smaller local sites for both gaming news and for world news, and those two are enough.

The more that I think about my internet usage, the more I’m realizing that I don’t really mind its enshitification - because ever since it started happening, I’ve been just removing addictions from my life and replacing it with more niche or smaller sites that are updated less frequently, don’t stalk me, and I’ve slowly started to realize that thanks to that I can do a lot more done and don’t get trapped by scrolling through clickbaity dopamine rush made to keep me glued to a screen.

I recommend reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40672036-digital-minimalism . I’ve already read it several times, and never managed to get into fully implementing it. I did stop using Facebook, and reduced my Reddit usage drastically during those years, but this enshitification is only making it easier to just not using anything I really don’t need. I’m looking forward to WEI and other “You can’t do this” stuff that will come with it, because it’s exactly the trigger that will make me stop and think “Do I really need to do this? Or are there better ways how to solve this.”. And the answer is almost always “Nope”.