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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 understan

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.

sudosysgen 5y ago
Drop into your local forest, do absolutely nothing. Eventually witness a wild animal kill you. Does that justify ecocide?
- avereveard 5y ago
  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.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    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 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.
kweingar 5y ago
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.
- hyperhopper 5y ago
  I don't think a video game necessarily needs to brush aside ethics: it's a game, you're allowed to be unethical.
hoelle 5y ago
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.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "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.

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.

sudosysgen 5y ago

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

avereveard 5y ago
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.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  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 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.

kweingar 5y ago

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.

hyperhopper 5y ago
I don't think a video game necessarily needs to brush aside ethics: it's a game, you're allowed to be unethical.

hoelle 5y ago

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.

pmoriarty 5y ago
"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.