Being productive doesn’t require you to be productive non-stop. It’s not good for you and will likely make you far less productive in the long run Trivia on farming: Medieval peasants worked far less than modern employees (at most 150 days a year). It was obviously harder physical work than sitting in an office all day, but they had plenty of downtime
Medieval peasants also had life expectancy of 30 years, what’s your point?
That is not true. You are passing on an ill informed myth.
I don't agree with "Factorio is like work". The grind is no different to me than playing Diablo. It feels like a comparison that programmers love to tout because it makes for a memeable and relatable story but at its core it's just like any other gameplay loop.
To me, it starts to feel like work when I have to rebuild large parts of my factory because I didn't leave enough space to expand. This process feels exactly like having to refactor a bad codebase (where you feel the urge to just start from scratch).
If you plan your build properly, you can avoid this, but it takes a few runs to learn the best strategies.
I'm looking over the sentences in the comment you replied to and I can't figure out where you would have gotten lost, can you quote the partial sentence that confused you?
It starts out as a typical programmer rant these days about AI assistants and LLM fine tuning and then goes on to complain how sadly, they don't work for this game yet. So he's forced to play it manually. How old fashioned. I find that pretty amusing.
Oh well if you thought someone was going to say they dislike LLMs failures so they want fewer LLMs, and instead they say they dislike LLM failures so they want LLMs to be trained more, that's not a garden path. You don't have to back up and re-process the previous words. And in particular a garden path sentence does it grammatically. You suddenly realize you were getting parts of speech wrong.
I know lots of people who play Factorio but for me, I guess it just feels too much like work? Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead, such as by contributing to my OSS projects (sometimes, maybe even for profit instead). I never got into these types of programmatic games for precisely this reason but I'd like to understand other perspectives on t…
I feel the same way, I was building something in a game 10 years ago and I thought to myself, “I’m putting all this effort into this game and at the end I won’t really have anything to show for it and this feels like the same energy I use when programming, let me program instead”. This thought changed me from someone who plays games to someone who makes games. The only real game I find entertaining and fun these days…
Nobody ever bikesheds me or makes me break flow to attend a Fun Team Event in Factorio :)
I know lots of people who play Factorio but for me, I guess it just feels too much like work? Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead, such as by contributing to my OSS projects (sometimes, maybe even for profit instead). I never got into these types of programmatic games for precisely this reason but I'd like to understand other perspectives on t…
There's a whole slew of great programming puzzle games where I get the same feel. One day while playing tis1000 I was like I should just learn fpga programming. Except for human resource machine that one stuck with me I guess because my daughter was playing as well.
But same with pico 8, I just want a real ide, debugger, unit tests. If I'm not getting those better be getting paid
I know lots of people who play Factorio but for me, I guess it just feels too much like work? Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead, such as by contributing to my OSS projects (sometimes, maybe even for profit instead). I never got into these types of programmatic games for precisely this reason but I'd like to understand other perspectives on t…
I feel the same way, I was building something in a game 10 years ago and I thought to myself, “I’m putting all this effort into this game and at the end I won’t really have anything to show for it and this feels like the same energy I use when programming, let me program instead”. This thought changed me from someone who plays games to someone who makes games. The only real game I find entertaining and fun these days…
Happened to me too. I was creating circuits and logic in Little Big Planet 2 when the realization hit. I then built and released a Android platformer.
My LBP2 levels had 50ish hearts.
My Android Game got 15k downloads
The article mentions one of the main appeals of factorio is you get to think like a programmer without bosses/overhead from actual work but it’s always been hard to get into games for that reason because I could just work on a side project with the same result. I really don’t understand the appeal.
I remember when Guitar Hero came out I didn't understand why anybody would play that instead of just buying a guitar. The point is the videogame itself is designed to be fun and remove plenty of other elements from the real life equivalent that focuses more on enjoyment and less on grinding it out. If you're thinking about "what have I accomplished?" instead of "I'm having so much fun!" then it might not be for you.…
I can't stand Guitar Hero because it's nothing like playing a real guitar and I'm therefore no good at it. At least the Rock Band drums vaguely approximate playing a cheap e-kit and the vocal part has proper pitch detection... unfortunately a real guitar is hard to replicate with cheap plastic hardware. There's also the fact that memorizing a real song is easier than memorizing colored buttons because you can build a mental model of the song around your knowledge of music theory.
On the topic of complex games a la Factorio: I've been playing a lot of Age of Empires II with my friends lately and have come to enjoy it. I previously shied away from RTSes because I was terrified of the meta but I've gotten decent enough to consistently beat the CPU on Moderate. I have no shot of ever commanding an army of trebuchets and knights in real life so doing it on my ThinkPad via Proton is the next best thing :-D
I know lots of people who play Factorio but for me, I guess it just feels too much like work? Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead, such as by contributing to my OSS projects (sometimes, maybe even for profit instead). I never got into these types of programmatic games for precisely this reason but I'd like to understand other perspectives on t…
That’s why I prefer Satisfactory : it’s the same principle but it also allows you to build gigantic great and beautiful things. For me it’s the perfect mix between Factorio (for building factories) and Minecraft (for allowing you to create your environment) and, contrary to those two, it’s also aesthetically beautiful. In fact building production lines is not even what I prefer, what I prefer is organizing them in ch…
I've never tried Factorio, but I found Satisfactory very boring after a few hours. It was initially fun to do some exploring and make some initial manufacturing lines. However, when I realised that to scale up the manufacturing, then I would have to place all these components by hand hundreds of times, it just felt like boring make-work, and I never turned it on again. Maybe I would have continued if there was some way of automating the building, such as some sort of 2D viewer.
I'm terrified of Factorio. I've deliberatly avoided playing it because I know, if I do, I'll lose an entire month. Kudos to the creators on their brilliant game, it's like heroin for a particular type of brain.
I was really looking forward to the expansion that came out on Monday. I chose not to play the main game anymore for the last several months. But then life threw some curve balls and I can't bring myself to buy it, knowing it would pull me away from the stuff I need to do. Hopefully soon...
I think because - or to speak for myself, the reason I've never bought/played it, despite being interested - it's similar and yet not productive. Versus say Call of Duty or whatever that you might lose yourself in, which is also not productive, but bears no resemblance to work. Pilot communities probably say similar things about flight sims (or flight components of games) that aren't good enough to be useful practice…
It’s not in any way similar to coding, though - it’s a puzzle-solving game. It’s not made to simulate any engineering discipline, nor user to train engineers (like flight sims are)
I can think of a bunch of similarities just off the top of my head: throughput management is probably the most critical skill in factorio, and obviously comes up all over software engineering. Managing production belt chains is not unlike managing your program's call stack. Ensuring the right resource reaches a production facility is like managing input types.