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How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

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Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#71

Post by satvikpendem »

delichon wrote: post #67
satvikpendem wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose, and it can still be impactful, depending on the user. It feels way more impactful than anything I can make in Factorio or similar.

This behavior is known as "play". Many of us find it stimulating. If it doesn't work for you you have my sympathy.

I play, just not in the same terms as my work. For example, I shoot bad guys, but I also know people in the military who refuse to play FPS games.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#72

Post by satvikpendem »

averageRoyalty wrote: post #65
satvikpendem wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps not, but my fun can in part be traced to impact.

Are the FPS games you play also about impact? You seem to have set yourself a different bar for 'fun' for this title (or genre?) alone.

Of course not. I think you misunderstand, if a game is too similar to real life, I am unsure why I should play it, whereas if it is fairly different, such as an FPS, it becomes much more fun for me. My question is primarily on the former, of why people seem to play a game that basically is like work but has no benefit for them. If it's fun for them, then that's fine, but my question more, why is it fun for them in the first place? That's really what I want to figure out.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#73

Post by satvikpendem »

serf wrote: post #56
dartos wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad. This makes me sad. You don’t need to make software for mass appeal. Git is weird and bizarre (especially when initially released), but it’s used and well loved.

>This makes me sad. I gotta say, I think I agree. Maybe it's just rose-tinted-glasses, but I remember a time when software was split between "IBM-Corpo" culture, and zany SV/MIT/Caltech culture where people threw things at the wall and proceeded when stuff stuck. It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo, and everyone feels the need to be ever-productive and adhere to strict rules and schema. t…

Bring back counterculture hackers

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#74

Post by kfrzcode »

delichon wrote: post #67
satvikpendem wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose, and it can still be impactful, depending on the user. It feels way more impactful than anything I can make in Factorio or similar.

This behavior is known as "play". Many of us find it stimulating. If it doesn't work for you you have my sympathy.

I've found myself in playtime with Claude 3.5 lately; it scratches both itches very satisfyingly.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#75

Post by DonHopkins »

satvikpendem wrote: post #41
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fps: the US military thanks you for training for infantry in your spare time.

Funnily enough, I actually used to play America's Army 3, a game which explicitly was funded by the DoD. It was pretty fun, not gonna lie, much more tactical than many other shooters during that time.

But by your own measure, you're not killing actual people, so why waste your time?

Do you finally get it now?

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#76

Post by delichon »

satvikpendem wrote: post #71
delichon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This behavior is known as "play". Many of us find it stimulating. If it doesn't work for you you have my sympathy.

I play, just not in the same terms as my work. For example, I shoot bad guys, but I also know people in the military who refuse to play FPS games.

  When I asked Kovařík about this, he brought up Euro Truck Simulator, a wilfully mundane game about hauling cargo. The developers, who are friends of his, once told him that many of their most enthusiastic players are ... truckers. Truckers who spend their time off from their trucking jobs pretending to do more trucking ... a lot of people actually enjoy the work they do. They just don’t always enjoy their jobs that much, because of all the things that get in the way of the work.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#77

Post by DonHopkins »

dowakin wrote: post #26

BTW "Factorio: Space Age" was release a few days ago. Personally, I'm going to spend whole Sunday playing it :)

I've started a new Space Age game, too!

With the understanding that you can regularly leave Factorio running overnight or even all week to build up resources, how many hours have other hard core Factorio players logged?

My Factorio play time is up to 6,573.2 hours at this point.

I love Factorio for the same reasons I love SimCity. 6,573.2 hours seems like a lot of time, but I've probably logged even more hours playing SimCity since 1989. (But much of that was actual productive time porting it to various platforms, testing, debugging, and optimizing the actual source code and user interface, etc.)

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#78

Post by gessha »

serf wrote: post #56
dartos wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad. This makes me sad. You don’t need to make software for mass appeal. Git is weird and bizarre (especially when initially released), but it’s used and well loved.

>This makes me sad. I gotta say, I think I agree. Maybe it's just rose-tinted-glasses, but I remember a time when software was split between "IBM-Corpo" culture, and zany SV/MIT/Caltech culture where people threw things at the wall and proceeded when stuff stuck. It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo, and everyone feels the need to be ever-productive and adhere to strict rules and schema. t…

The hacker culture is still there but hacker social media (unless carefully curated) is flooded with optimized content to the point where the cool stuff is hard to find and you only see the grifter techs.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#79

Post by satvikpendem »

delichon wrote: post #76
satvikpendem wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I play, just not in the same terms as my work. For example, I shoot bad guys, but I also know people in the military who refuse to play FPS games.

When I asked Kovařík about this, he brought up Euro Truck Simulator, a wilfully mundane game about hauling cargo. The developers, who are friends of his, once told him that many of their most enthusiastic players are ... truckers. Truckers who spend their time off from their trucking jobs pretending to do more trucking ... a lot of people actually enjoy the work they do. They just don’t always enjoy their jobs that m…

Good for them, fortunately I'm not a trucker.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#80

Post by satvikpendem »

uoaei wrote: post #69
switchbak wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they're saying that per-se, I think they're saying: it's perfectly ok to both "have fun" AND "not build something meaningful" at the same time. I don't think you need to read in that having fun necessarily excludes doing something meaningful. While we're on the topic of assuming intent: that invented word "problematic" - problematic to whom? Something being a problem is almost always a subjective stance…

problematic to the maintenance of a good-faith social contract

What is this contract?
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