I think the first analogy the author made to shenzen io is still a good one for factorio, just a lesser scale. This is engineering without many of the messy unf

I think the first analogy the author made to shenzen io is still a good one for factorio, just a lesser scale. This is engineering without many of the messy unfun parts. No setting up tool-chains, or build tools, or your environment and being totally lost in what to do. The game itself will (usually) not have bugs and it has a clearly defined goal (which can be difficult for things like personal projects if that part of the creativity/drive just isn't there). So even if it is a game that invokes the messy parts of engineering, it does so without actually making them sometimes intractable because it has been designed around those (and in fact is designed to specifically smooth out the curve of difficulty). The other thing to keep in mind is that like many of the zachtronics games this one is not directly programming. The spatial orientation puzzles and 2d layout and organization of the factory is distinctly different from most programming. I would compare it to trying a language like Lisp or Haskell when has only used languages like C, C#, and Java. It's a totally different take on the concept of symbolic computation (re: programming). And it is one unlike any programming language you will have ever used. So if you enjoy the experience of learning new paradigms, and viewing classic computational ideas from the perspectives of those new paradigms, factorio might be fun for that. Hopefully that's helpful.