when the game says minimum system requirements is lower than your current operating system. Does that mean you cannot run the game? IE my system is 11 and the game minimum says 7 or 10.

It means exactly the opposite.

But what you should really look at is Works on. This part lists all the supported systems.

"Minimum" implies that you need that as the very least...so, if you have something better, it should work.

If your system would NOT meet the "minimum" requirements (example: the mininum requires Win11, but you have only Win 7 - then the game might not run on your system).

What game are we talking about?
Does it also show "recommended" requirements? If so - what are these?

Edit: exchanged "maximum" with "recommended".

Reminds me also of having an old webcam, installer says i can't install because it's the wrong version of windows and unsupported, yet if i extracted the drivers and manually installed it, it worked just fine.

This seems to be a mixed bag and difficult to decipher sometimes. I see a 'Works on' field which lists all recent operating systems, but the minimum (different area) is a bit harder to tell. A number of DosBox games for example was listed as the minimum of having Windows 8, when in fact you can run them much lower and easier. I'd wager a number of DosBox games you could run on native hardware once you extracted the files.

It will depend on the game, if it's a newer game (in the last 5 years) it's more likely to be the minimum. If it's an older game with a wrapper you can probably get away with getting the game to run.

thanks. another question. I recently downloaded a game dragon Age origins but it wont open. it gives me a message physXloader.dli not found. I tried reinstalling the game as suggested and got the same result. Suggestions?

https://technical-tips.com/blog/internet/physxloaderdll-missing--what-13

As a complement:

https://www.gog.com/forum/dragon_age_origins_ultimate_edition/physxloaderdll_missing

Note post n5