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The Factorio Mindset

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Re: The Factorio Mindset

#241

Post by _9omd »

My problem with games like Factorio (and more recently Oxygen no Included), is that after I get addicted and get up past 100 hours of gameplay I start to question what the hell I'm doing with my life. Up until that point it's great fun designing, building, and optimizing, but then a switch in my head flips. I start to become anxious about the fact that I was excited about getting better at skills in a virtual world. Usually around this time I start watching videos of more advanced builds, and then become increasingly depressed about the idea of sinking 1000+ hours into a game, when I could just be building something in the real world, or out riding my bike. This is usually the time I put the game down and never play it again.

I think the problem for me is that these games give me the illusion of learning, building, and accomplishing things, which my little engineer brain loves. But once I come out of the haze of addiction, I realize it's nothing more than an illusion, and I just stomach going on.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#242

Post by genewitch »

MattRix wrote: post #93
lordnacho wrote: post #78

I'm literally playing Factorio right now, with my kid. Got into it over Christmas based on HN talking about it all the time. Good game to multi because I don't have to pay attention all the time. It really reminds me of software in many ways. You fiddle with tiny little things like balancing a belt, and then move on to building belt balancers. You then move up the abstractions to where you're not really placing inser…

Dyson Sphere Program is a great Factorio-like that feels more optimistic and less dark. It’s still about harvesting every last resource though. On the other hand there’s Terra Nil, where the goal is to clean up a destroyed landscape and then leave it without a trace. It’s more of a puzzle game than a factory game, but still worth playing: https://vfqd.itch.io/terra-nil

I've been waiting for Terra Nil since August, i think. I'm always bummed out when i see someone playing a game for video, and it's "not available yet". It's almost as bad as games that have been in early access for over a year.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#243

Post by serverholic »

pm90 wrote: post #235
serverholic wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure. I'd legitimately love to get inside their heads and see what makes them tick because it's a completely foreign mindset for me. I saw some recently on twitter who were discussing how they run their relationships like a corporate business... They have standups, 1on1's, scheduled relationship sync up meetings, etc. As if doing this bullshit during their day jobs wasn't enough.

“Don’t trust stuff you read on the internet”. I would be careful about this stuff as a lot of people are in the “productivity coach” market.

Are you warning me so I don't get sucked into that mindset? If so then you've seriously misunderstood my comments.

I despise productivity hacker, grindset culture.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#244

Post by bduerst »

enraged_camel wrote: post #185
bduerst wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, currently playing through DSP myself, as a factorio veteran. DSP is a great successor, even more than Satisfactory . It's amazing how well the DSP devs have figured out how to scale from small factory plots to inter-planetary supply chains to galaxy-wide economies, all to build a mega project. The only thing that's really missing (and same with Satisfactory , IMO) is the punishment for expanding too far too fast…

I'd like a greater focus on externalities, honestly. Oxygen Not Included does that really well IMO. Almost every production process has inputs and outputs, and a lot of the outputs are waste that you need to figure out either how to utilize as input in another process, or to dispose of safely and in a scalable way so as to avoid negative repercussions. Waste isn't just in the form of products either. For example, one…

Yeah, ONI is fantastic in this regard. I find myself struggling with it in late game for precisely this reason - if you don't lay the ground work for things like heat when building your initial setup, it's much harder to rip it up and move on.

With DSP you can just move to another planet and rebuild, which is great from scalability but less important challenge wise.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#245

Post by sudosysgen »

kuschku wrote: post #219
sudosysgen wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will be a problem in a few hundred years of our energy consumption continues growing at this rate; I've done the math on this website a year or two ago.

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.

Yes, I think we are in agreement?

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#246

Post by desireco42 »

I got addicted to Dyson Sphere Program... already clocked in 100s of hours, pretty much embarrassed to admit how much I play the game.

Restarted it few times to apply what I learned. It is still early in the game, they keep adding things but that thing is really amazing and provided fun to me that I didn't feel in the game for a long time.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#247

Post by bduerst »

kroltan wrote: post #207
nohr wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you play Eco with 2 people?

Not really, the game is really made for the "10s of people scale". But thanks to how it works, it doesn't need 10s of coordinated people, you can certainly just join some existing server with a friend and have an equally good time.

This was my biggest annoyance with Eco. It really does take a community, which is disappointing because you can't scale it down to 1-4 players. Are there any mods for this?

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#248

Post by samwisedum »

impalallama wrote: post #183

> 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.... But since trying it out a bit more I’m starting to suspect that Factorio is the rare computer game to actually increase GDP. Hell of an opener that just makes me immediately dislike this guys entire worldview. Kinda also backed up by the fact that he doesn't mention the…

Exactly, the first paragraphs read almost like satire.

I found the necessity to have a devastating impact on the planet's ecosystem fascinating. Even trying a "clean run" where you minimize pollution and number of killed aliens, you can't avoid the alien native's natural expansion. It's probably impossible to win without a lot killing.

That said, I don't think the game has bad intentions. It highlights the zero sum nature of resources and negatives of expansion at all costs.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#249

Post by hyperhopper »

pm90 wrote: post #231
kortilla wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he doesn't mention the very unsubtle commentary of you basically strip mining an alien planet clean mutating the wild life into a homicidal frenzy in desperate attempt to stop you from killing their home with pollution. People who get hung up on this are pretty shallow though. It’s such a tiring trope of “oh no, look at how bad colonialism is”. There is a lot of good stuff to discuss about the game beyond the sopho…

The game allows one to disable the wildlife, no mods required, so it’s possible to focus solely on game without dealing with it at all. However. I do think it’s a pretty amazing mechanic that the game designers put in the game, and is a great tool to shine light on the darkest aspect of the human race: our unbelievable capacity to subdue and destroy. Factorio isn’t just about being dropped in a war zone and shooting…

What do you mean "speculate"? Seems pretty straightforward: you're polluting and killing the native life. And? Do that in real life = bad. Do that in a game = ok. I think we all know that.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#250

Post by hyperhopper »

kweingar wrote: post #211
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.

In most of these colonization/industrialization games, the entire point is the thrill of taming a wild land and producing grand feats of engineering out of nothing. The survivalist framing, with mindlessly hostile natives, is just a narrative convenience to brush aside the ethical implications of invasion.

I don't think a video game necessarily needs to brush aside ethics: it's a game, you're allowed to be unethical.
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