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The Factorio Mindset

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Re: The Factorio Mindset

#281

Post by avereveard »

sudosysgen wrote: post #210
avereveard wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start a game, do absolutely nothing. Witness aliens killing you nonetheless. Aliens aren't the poor good natives, and it's so easily disproven I don't understand how it ever become to be a thing.

Drop into your local forest, do absolutely nothing. Eventually witness a wild animal kill you. Does that justify ecocide?

Have you played the game? Biters are an infestation, if you do nothing they'll eat up the remaining available surface and destroy the local biomass. The engineer has at least a choice, and it's goal isn't infinite consumption.

Sure locally a bear can get me in a forest, but I don't need ecocide to survive a bear, and neither the engineer has to to survive biters.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#282

Post by avereveard »

taneq wrote: post #265
avereveard wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's quite easy to put a dent in the "poor good alien" narrative: stand around doing nothing. once enough time passes, biters will kill you irregardless. mind it does take a while for them to come get you, but they will come: https://i.imgur.com/GFxUvu4.png so the engineer motive is clear: survival, not invasion. besides, the aliens are an infestation, not part of the ecosystem; as a matter of fact, alien left to the…

> aliens are there to consume, no less than the engineer. Same as all other life really.

Eh, life tend to sit in an equilibrium with its environment, biters will happily destroy it. Their evolution and multiplication happens regardless of engineer actions.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#283

Post by sudosysgen »

avereveard wrote: post #281
sudosysgen wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drop into your local forest, do absolutely nothing. Eventually witness a wild animal kill you. Does that justify ecocide?

Have you played the game? Biters are an infestation, if you do nothing they'll eat up the remaining available surface and destroy the local biomass. The engineer has at least a choice, and it's goal isn't infinite consumption. Sure locally a bear can get me in a forest, but I don't need ecocide to survive a bear, and neither the engineer has to to survive biters.

I did play the game, way too much actually.

The biters don't actually destroy the biomass. Canonically, in the game, they've been there forever : https://wiki.factorio.com/Enemies , so their expansion is only triggered by the arrival of the engineer.

They also consume pollution, making them symbiotic with the local biomass.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#284

Post by sudosysgen »

beaconstudios wrote: post #267
kuschku wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the rate our energy consumption is growing, even if we avoid climate change wrecking our society today, the heat waste of our energy production will start to eclipse the effects of climate change in only a few centuries, at most a millenium. Which isn’t that long of a time.

Depends on the source of energy production - if we're drawing all our energy from solar and wind, then we're not introducing new energy into the earth. That's the problem with fossil fuels - we're reintroducing sequestered carbon into the atmosphere; if we were to burn wood instead and keep the carbon cycle in balance then it wouldn't be an issue. Nuclear energy does introduce new energy though, so that could cause i…

That's actually not true. If we use solar energy, we are reducing the albedo of the earth, thereby introducing more energy than otherwise.

As far as wind, you are correct, but the amount of wind energy we can harvest is limited enough that there simply won't be enough at that point assuming that trend.

Similarly with wood, at that point we would just run out of wood.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#286

Post by pm90 »

zouhair wrote: post #257

> I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year. I dunno if the author is joking or not, but I heard this argument over and over. Am I in the minority to think that it's totally insane that everything should revolve around raising the GDP? I feel smart people working at Facebook or Google working hard at finding new ways…

A charitable interpretation is that it’s an attempt to continue the spectacular growth of labor efficiency that has lifted large sections of the world out of poverty. Doesn’t change that it’s rather silly to constantly think of individual actions’ effect on a macroeconomic measure.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#287

Post by pmoriarty »

hoelle wrote: post #213
avereveard wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start a game, do absolutely nothing. Witness aliens killing you nonetheless. Aliens aren't the poor good natives, and it's so easily disproven I don't understand how it ever become to be a thing.

Might be overthinking it a bit. The biters are a game mechanic to add time pressure to build your defenses up to par with your factory expansion. Sort of a deadline to stop you from navel gazing too much. You can disable them entirely at game start, completely skip military tech, and your pollution cloud will still blight the land, poisoning trees and lakes (and fish) around you.

"You can disable them entirely at game start, completely skip military tech, and your pollution cloud will still blight the land, poisoning trees and lakes (and fish) around you."

You can turn off pollution too.

There are also mods that'll let you grow trees or fight pollution in other ways.

There's a cost to pollution in the vanilla game, when both pollution and biters are turned on, so it's not like this game is pro-pollution.

I have a bigger problem with nuclear waste having no consequences.

But even then... it's just a game!

I find it curious that some people get up in arms over the ethical issues in a game like Factorio, yet hardly anyone (outside the religious right) complains in all the violence in the most popular games of all: AAA first-person-shooters... or most games, really, as most of them place the player in the role of a killer, where you solve problems and win by learning to be a more effective killer.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#289

Post by pmoriarty »

martincmartin wrote: post #22
julianeon wrote: post #20

I often encounter this issue when it comes to programming-like games. I’m wondering if I should adjust my thinking here. 1) Hmm, this game is a lot like programming. A lot like it. 2) Maybe I should just program? That is real work & I can get done more work done, be more productive. 3) [stopped game, started programming]

What other games are like programming?

"What other games are like programming?"

Some lesser-known recommendations:

Bitburner (a game in which you use javascript to "hack" computers... not really hacking, but really using your javascript skills)

Screeps (use real programming languages to harvest and compete for resources... sort of like an RTS, but where you program your units instead of directly telling them what to do)

Neon Noodles (use a simple visual programming language to program robots to make sushi... super innovative game, with a free demo on steam... highly recommended)

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#290

Post by pmoriarty »

electroly wrote: post #36
julianeon wrote: post #20

I often encounter this issue when it comes to programming-like games. I’m wondering if I should adjust my thinking here. 1) Hmm, this game is a lot like programming. A lot like it. 2) Maybe I should just program? That is real work & I can get done more work done, be more productive. 3) [stopped game, started programming]

Factorio is right on the cusp for me. SpaceChem, too. TIS-100 was a bomb for me; if I'm literally writing code, it better end up in a GitHub repo. With Factorio for me, I always reach a point where I know how I'm going to scale up, and then I lose interest in actually doing so. Just knowing that I could do it is satisfying enough.

"TIS-100 was a bomb for me; if I'm literally writing code, it better end up in a GitHub repo"

I was frustrated by TIS-100 for exactly the opposite reason: it wasn't enough like programming to interest me.

It's really a puzzle game, not a programming game. Its similarity to programming is just window dressing.

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