It's the big stick because through the magic of the Internet, people can give random threats about anything and everything. It's much harder to give random incentives, because with the exception of praise (which by definition happens after the fact) incentives require something concrete, i.e. some sort of commitment and/or physical contact. Who wants to make commitments, or - gasp! - actually try to go somewhere to meet somebody and give them a pat on the back? Nope. Thus, random and incessant threats, cajoling, ridicule, rantings, ravings, insults and various other negativities. It's just easier that way.
And yeah, I had quite a few games running just fine at one point. Oblivion, Mass Effect, Civilization IV, Half-Life 2, etc. The problem is, these all used to work properly. I came to the conclusion my laptop was actually too powerful, and the fucker overheats. The idiots that made it didn't upgrade the fan when slamming in a powerful (and, even worse, integrated) graphics card, sound card, processor et al. The small one worked OK for about two months, until things started to get a little dusty (which, due to another awesome facet of the design, you cannot get at to clean out) and old it basically didn't' work at all. I already replaced the entire melted-down motherboard under warranty at the year marker. And, sure enough, the computer worked fine again for a while, but I've put more than a year on the new board and it shows. I tried to be a little nicer on this one, but at this point I have trouble just playing music for longer than six hours.
EDIT: and USB is definately the way to go. At this point, I'm pretty sure they're actually cheaper than an equivalent amount of CD space.
