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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 instea

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 this. The games I play instead are wholly unrelated to my work life, such as FPS or RPG ones, where there is a clear distinction between what I can do and what I want to do.

Salgat 2y ago
To me it just feels very repetitive. I don't feel clever building out factories, I just feel more like a drone doing iterative manual labor. As an engineer I just couldn't get into it.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Fps: the US military thanks you for training for infantry in your spare time.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  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.
  - atrus 2y ago
    It also convinced me to never join the army, because I was a bullet magnet haha.
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      Haha, I would never dream of actually getting shot at, lol.
    - switchbak 2y ago
      Operation Flashpoint (early version of ARMA) did that for me. You sneak around for an hour, then get shot in the face and it's all over. Imagine that, but for your life ... fuck war.
  - ekidd 2y ago
    I remember speaking to several of the people who worked on America's Army back around 2007, when Counter-Strike was all the rage. I think this was at the GDC. The people I spoke with were from the Army. And they found CS-style games agonizing to watch. So many people running around with no plan, so much friendly fire, so many unrealistic tactics. You could practically see them shudder. They also had some people who worked in logistics. I remember one of them saying, "If the United States decides to invade a country, the software we wrote could calculate how much toilet paper we'd need."
    - wiseowise 2y ago
      Of course it is agonizing, CS doesn’t try to replicate real world scenario. In real life if you die - you die, you don’t get to respawn with $800.
      - 47282847 2y ago
        You sure?
        wiseowise 2y ago
        I haven't tried it myself, but heard that this is indeed the case.
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    But by your own measure, you're not killing actual people, so why waste your time? Do you finally get it now?
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      My work is not killing actual people, so your analogy is flawed.
- beeflet 2y ago
  Gonna enlist and be the first man to rocket jump
  - wiseowise 2y ago
    Finally my 14 years of TF2 will pay off. Do they have sticky bombs too?
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      Or Quake 3!
- falcolas 2y ago
  Practicing point and click skills probably won't to help much with your firearm accuracy. Or cardio.
Taek 2y ago
Its just fun. "Okay wth, today we're going to make the entire base solar powered" 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. But in Factorio? Nobody is using it so sure, make it bizzare. Change the rules, let yourself go. Don't test the design just send it. Bored? Too challenging? Don't bother finishing the design do something else.
- dartos 2y ago
  > 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.
  - serf 2y ago
    >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. tl;dr : I remember when the fun Factorio game was qbasic.exe and no one blinked about it. We all had fun. (p.s. I love factorio now too)
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      Bring back counterculture hackers
      - tux3 2y ago
        What do you mean, back! There's more than ever! We're overflowing with talented peeps hacking on cool things, writing nice blogs publishing zines, and so forth and on! The formerly-counterculture conventions got so cult and big they grew a counter-counterculture of smaller places. Outside the walls of the AI SaaS grind. There be life.
highwind 2y ago
Just like any other video games, I like these type of management games because it's "work" without real-life consequences. I can play the min-max game without any unknowns that comes from real life management. Or I can destroy everything and mess everything up too. It's my escapism.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
I submit that if "but I could be doing something productive instead" is a common thought when you are trying to have fun, that is the problem and not Factorio. It's perfectly ok to just have fun and not build something meaningful.
- uoaei 2y ago
  Your implication that the definition of fun excludes meaningfulness is equally problematic.
  - switchbak 2y ago
    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, not a universal truth as that word implies.
    - uoaei 2y ago
      problematic to the maintenance of a good-faith social contract
      - satvikpendem 2y ago
        What is this contract?
        uoaei 2y ago
        I find it hard to believe that faux dumbfounded naivete jives with the terms of the social contract.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  I can have fun without needing to build anything meaningful at all though, but when the barriers get to close, that's when I start having an issue, in my experience. That's why I play games that don't replicate work in a sense.
hluska 2y ago
I wasn’t into video games for a long time for the exact reasons as you aren’t into Factorio. The ones I was interested in always felt too much like a job. Minecraft with a kid was my gateway drug and I got into Factorio really quickly after. It’s actually a really special game. There are elements of it that are practice for real world scenarios, but it is very relaxing, stress free and commitment free. It’s a great game to sit down with for an hour after work to decompress and become normal again. It’s also an incredibly fun game to share with a group of people on one device. That’s something I haven’t experienced since the 1990s, but it’s really enjoyable to get together with a group and build together. It’s an excellent cooperative game and is a great way to really get to know people. It’s even more fun when you play it with people from a range of professions - one of my favourite Factorio groups is a bartender, a cook, a lawyer and a software developer. We think differently but when it all comes together, it’s really neat. I understand that it’s not for everyone and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t have nearly the reflexes for FPS so we’re likely quite different in terms of the games we like. But I find it very relaxing and very enjoyable. It reminds me a lot of QBasic on an old Tandy - it’s that same thrill of tinkering because tinkering is fun.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  I feel you, I used to play many single player games as well like Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, or Sly Cooper, over games that wanted me to expend significant brain power. They are still incredible games that don't have the same effect as Factorio does, they feel wholly different in their goals.
SigmundA 2y ago
I feel the same way sometimes, it definitely closer to the same loop of plan execute refactor then many games. I do find my self getting wrapped up into then backing off because it does feel like work. But I like the fact that I can see it working in realtime, its just pretty, this machine I built that I can zoom into and see the smallest detail actually working. Wish software was more like that, a good debugger can get closer to that but way more clunky and poor performing than Factorio.
- exodust 2y ago
  You're right. The intoxication of graphics and visual design in games can't be underestimated. It's more than a paint job or window dressing. It slots into the whole itch-scratching appeal and addiction. I agree debugging tools could make more use of visualisation. I remember the excellent HTML 3d view in Firefox, removed from version 47. For some reason we can't have nice things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqHV625EU3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqHV625EU3E Not sure if there's a way to get it back. I heard it's available in Edge, but I don't use that browser.
zen928 2y ago
Splitting from the experiences of others, I think the mentality somewhat comes down to your preference in what you seek to do in videogames and how you engage with them. In these types of sandbox building games, career developers naturally get somewhat of a "cheat" to becoming proficient quickly in that the mode of expressing logical sentiments will only ever be a few abstractions away from what you would do normally at your work, so you feel less constrained to building understanding of a system and can instead use the system as a way to output your ideas in a way faster than others might. In this sense, it's somewhat of a power fantasy that if you vs the average person were to play this game that you would most likely be able to clearly express your ideas and goals and be able to act on them, which makes it fun to go off the rails to show off "some crazy thing" you've made as a slight nod to your perceived skill being able to make these things. Consequently, that's why I'm so disinterested in learning these games. The discussion about them shifts into a thin one layer abstraction for other people to try to brag about their accomplishments and what they self injected as their experience instead of the game itself. This doesn't affect the gameplay, but it affects my perception of the game as a shallow vehicle for attention seekers more than it promotes the ideas of fun gameplay. That said, sometimes the style of gameplay resonates with a style of development you might have been interested in understanding more and can use it as a way to get motivation or inspiration for ideas. Automating pipelines, physics simulations, etc. I think it's always worth a shot on games that have notable recognition of quality to see if it jives with what you enjoy, but it's been the exception more than the rule in my case.
instalabs 2y ago
> Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead This is me, but extended to all games. I stopped playing games because I feel like I can always do something more productive with my time instead. If I really want to check out, I watch some TV instead. But games (especially modern ones) take too much work without any real reward.
luffy_t 2y ago
I feel exactly the same. I don't think the problems you solve in factorio are that complex, they are just tedious. It feels like calculations that a calculator can do. It is utterly boring to me personally, I can simply write a program or come up with a formula once I know what I need to make to calculate how much of everything I need. I also like to play simpler games which stimulates more of a lower part of my brain (motor control shit that feels good) no need to think too much in these game since I do a lot of that in my real life job. I have mostly been working on research problems where you can't generally write these rules for how to solve a particular subproblem and that feels like actual problem solving I just don't get when people say they love the problem solving aspect of the game. I mean if you think solving simple mathematical optimization problems that already have a solution "problem solving" then good for you. The average game time is too long and it is just not worth my time.
- Dr4kn 2y ago
  Ratios are one thing. To find a good tileable design, which is also UPS efficient, especially with beacons can get quite challenging
  - luffy_t 2y ago
    It can be but my point is when you face those types of challenges in you work and solve them you realize how much better and satisfying those challenges are in real life compared to Factorio which takes away the fun part of playing it.
- treflop 2y ago
  I’m inclined to agree. I also don’t get people who look up YouTube videos on how to do things in Factorio. What’s the fun part left to do if you just use someone else’s factory or belt design?
  - luffy_t 2y ago
    yes once you watch those videos it takes away the problem solving element as well.
p3rls 2y ago
I feel the same about when I play HoI4-- really winning a two-front war on ironman and building webapps have a lot of similarities.
balls187 2y ago
I feel the same. Factorio was fun for a small bit but it really just felt like a job, same with Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, etc. After beating prepatch PCR, I switched back to Call of Duty for a bit.
- psygn89 2y ago
  Same with me. When I was younger I was able to just enjoy myself without mixing irl thoughts. Unfortunately these days as an adult if I'm stuck in a game or have to chip at it in some tedious fashion, a part of my brain goes "you can spend this time learning something new or productive irl". I think my attitude changed the games I play also. I used to play MMO when I was younger but FPS games give me that dopamine rush without any commitments. Sadly it's only when I'm sick do I feel I'm able to just cozy up without these "you can be doing something else" thoughts and truly enjoy games for what they are, tedious or not.
  - fwip 2y ago
    It's important to have time for yourself. You might want to think about scheduling some, if it feels like you can only really relax when you're sick.
imtringued 2y ago
This makes no sense to me. Doing productive things means 40 to 100 hour commitments with the possibility of your work being worthless at the end, because you didn't have enough time for that 40th or 100th hour, because you need to do a lot of upfront work, because you need specific hardware, because someone else did it better, because the maintainer rejected your pull request, because what you want to do actually takes 1000 hours. Now that is what I call tedious! Meanwhile open ended pvp multiplayer games can drain hundreds of hours with no feeling of accomplishment. Those are the games that make me feel I should be doing something more productive.
- phito 2y ago
  You have a very limited view on what being productive is. I have a home lab, I'd rather spend an hour or two improving it and learning things along the way rather than playing factorio.
chatmasta 2y ago
Some of my most overengineered code was written after a Factorio session… maybe it’s better treated as an outlet for some urges to which you shouldn’t acquiesce :)
discordance 2y ago
My day job is mostly CRUD or calling APIs. I trained my brain for many years to do more than that and Factorio satisfies that urge.
- doctorwho42 2y ago
  This. But for me it was moving into management instead of production. I don't really get to CAD/design in my day job, focusing on one of two projects with my mind for weeks on end. Instead I manage others and troubleshoot problems that arise that become impediments for my team. I also live in an apartment, so facotrio/building games are my outlet. Minimal impact on the environment, I get my design and building fix, and I can always stand up and walk away without much clean up.
bemmu 2y ago
I love Factorio, because in real life it's difficult to fully automate things so abstractly. It's so wonderfully simple to think that oh this thing goes here, is combined with this and this... profit. You then walk away from the game, inspired to apply such process-thinking to your actual work and life, and realize that it's actually rare to be able to do.
brundolf 2y ago
Not the same, but Slay the Spire could be described as a "programmatic game". I play it when I just need to burn some spare cycles (especially if programming is inaccessible to me at the moment, like when I only have my phone)
- ivanjermakov 2y ago
  I think there is a quite big player intersection between Factorio and Slay the Spire, despite being completely different genres. And I agree that StS is a nice way to relax from programming.
asjir 2y ago
reminds of me of this quote from the Tao of programming: https://farosaves.com/375baf1e-cc1c-4f02-8a7c-35eaba25d94d https://farosaves.com/375baf1e-cc1c-4f02-8a7c-35eaba25d94d
gloosx 2y ago
Do your work feels like you have infinite resources which you need to extract, connect and spend on building a fully automated planet-size megafactory all by yourself while fighting local roaches and acid-spitting bugs? What kind of work it is? Ironically the game goal is to leave that place :D
consp 2y ago
> I never got into these types of programmatic games for precisely this reason but I'd like to understand other perspectives on this. Everything you describe requires interaction with people. Those are too often toxic, incompetent, overly demanding and keep changin schedules and priorities. At least in single player games you get to drop all that crap.
medstrom 2y ago
Exactly how I feel with redstone contraptions in Minecraft. Already have OSS projects to my name, and my way to "play" is to refactor them endlessly. In a game I'm looking for a different type of fun for once.
newswasboring 2y ago
For me it's because it looks pretty. The light and sounds of factorio are so much fun. Trains going zoom, research centers going zip etc. I wish real programming tools were this much fun.
pjerem 2y ago
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 chaotically beautiful buildings. (Don’t think I want to start a debate, I loved the 3 games and played them a lot, it’s just that Satisfactory won my heart… even the name is great).
- gambiting 2y ago
  Same here. Played both, both are extremely satisfying to play, but Satisfactory is just..... pretty. It's nice to take a break from building the factory to just explore the world too.
- dbacar 2y ago
  IMHO, Factorio is aesthetically beautiful.
  - pjerem 2y ago
    In a stylistic way, yes. Not in the « what a beautiful multi floor truck station I built there, oh and btw, take this stair then on the mezzanine, take the door at the left to access the commands of the station. » way. It’s just different games. Factorio is excellent as building production lines while Satisfactory is excellent as making feel you « in » your creations with 3D, a lot of architectural options, a really immersive sound design (quitting your noisy machine room to a corridor and hearing the sound go down when the door closes). It’s different. But there is one important common thing with Factorio though : they are both made with a lot of love and with a lot of attention to every detail. In fact, both games could be an exemple of design and ergonomics for even professional softwares.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  You might want to try Dyson sphere program next ( ◔ ‿ ◔ )
- 2y ago
ivanjermakov 2y ago
It does feel like work, but that's okay! Some mechanics are mundane than others, e.g. compare clearing enemy bases to designing rail blueprints, but the game does everything to make it efficient and ejoyable: high performance, keyboard shortcuts, immense amount of quality of life features - all you get when devs love playing the game themselves. And, even Factorio being my favorite game, I still need to take a long breaks from it because building a factory is a lot of mental effort.
RandomThoughts3 2y ago
It’s funny because I don’t enjoy Factorio for the same reason you do - it quickly feels like work - but I never get the feeling I could be doing something more productive instead. I just think the core gameplay loop of Factorio is tedious and that it’s specifically designed for people who don’t mind that. The gameplay is fun at first. You have a ressource and something you want to produce. You look at the ratio of things, what the layout you will have to put in place, how fast things will have to move. You painfully build that. It works. You feel good. Then you realise it will just be more of the same ad infinity with the first time you do train design and liquids the sole inkling of novelty. It’s all fairly simple conceptually so it gets tedious and boring quite fast (at least to me). I think part of the issue is also that I tend to play it wrong by calculating and planning - literally work for which the in game tooling is not optimal - while I think I would have more fun just winging it and fixing things as they happen. What I mean is I think it’s not a game for everyone but I can see why it’s catnip for its intended audience.
- Filligree 2y ago
  If that’s how you want to play it, there are mods such as factory planner which will support that playstyle. Meanwhile, yeah, at least half my time is spent working around earlier mistakes. A main bus always works, but spaghetti is what makes the game fun.
- fwip 2y ago
  If you're looking for more novelty, there are a lot of mods that add cool new complexities. I like the Seablock pack - the core premise is that you crash land on a water world, and need to extract all your resources from water. The production loops are much more complicated (you start having to deal with byproduct management just an hour or two in), but in return there's almost no enemy time pressure. It also includes some ingame recipe-planner mods, so it's easier to plan-then-build.
  - RandomThoughts3 2y ago
    The core gameplay loop is still very much the same. More complex recipe is not really a more complex game. It just means more of the same planning and calculation but with more variables - which is to say more tedium not more fun.
taneq 2y ago
Same, I get to a certain stage in the game (usually the first big factory 'refactor') and find myself thinking that the exact same effort I'm applying to the game could be applied to any number of work-related things that would be just as fun and much more beneficial.
billfruit 2y ago
On the other hand, what bother me about factorio is its deterministic nature. Perhaps it would be more fun with more random elements like equipment failures etc.
bjackman 2y ago
I get the same feeling with increasingly many games as I get older. It started with games that are basically engineering work. But now it's anything with resource management or long-term strategic thinking (basically whenever I think "hmm, I need to note down my thoughts so I can pick up my strategy where I left of next time I play").
archerx 2y ago
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 is Rocket League, everything else feels slow and boring or I could be using this energy for something else. Not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse.
- aniviacat 2y ago
  > I’m putting all this effort into this game and at the end I won’t really have anything to show for it You will have something to show for it: Joy. If your only interest is to invest effort into producing something that provides some kind of physical value, then of course work will be more interesting than games. Development has fun parts and it has tedious parts. The tedious parts are what usually makes for a good product. Factorio removes that part; because it is not about producing a product, it's about having fun. > Not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse. That's up to you, but for me it'd be a curse, not being able to do thing just for fun anymore, because of always feeling a pressure to be productive.
  - armada651 2y ago
    > Development has fun parts and it has tedious parts. The tedious parts are what usually makes for a good product. Factorio removes that part; because it is not about producing a product, it's about having fun. Factorio also has tons of tedious parts. It really isn't all that different in that regard in my experience. There are many games these days that are designed to have a certain element of tediousness (grind) in them, because this gives you the sense of being productive without actually producing anything. > That's up to you, but for me it'd be a curse, not being able to do thing just for fun anymore, because of always feeling a pressure to be productive. I don't think they mean to say they always feel a pressure to be productive. If it costs you exactly the same amount of energy and you get the same amount of joy from it, then why would you not choose an activity that produces something of enduring value?
kwar13 2y ago
That sums up how I feel about it. I can see the appeal, but for that kind of mental effort I rather just keep coding.
wlesieutre 2y ago
Not just you, I had the same experience with Factorio. Other building games like Minecraft I could play for days, but Factorio stresses me out. I want to chill and make cool stuff, optimizing a factory while fending off aliens wasn’t relaxing.
chasing 2y ago
Haha. Yeah, I’m working on logic puzzles all day for work. The games I play to relax are either shoot-everything games or, like, MarioKart. I need to chill and not think.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
That's the feeling I get when I see day traders on Eve Online.
grogenaut 2y ago
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
TheRealPomax 2y ago
This is why Satisfactory works for me, but factorio doesn't: even though it's supposedly also a factory buildering, it's really much more of a world exploration game that happens to have factory building, but you don't have to build "a perfect factory" to get anything done, or unlock things that let you explore better. I can just throw down some buildings and link them up haphazardly and that strategy kind of works all the way up to near-enough-to-the-end to keep the game a fun running/driving/flying with occasional bouts of production line management, rather than feeling like I'm just doing work that a computer could do way better.
vl 2y ago
I felt same way after playing bunch of American Truck Simulator. Why I’m doing this? I can just go and drive real car instead!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Salgat 2y ago

To me it just feels very repetitive. I don't feel clever building out factories, I just feel more like a drone doing iterative manual labor. As an engineer I just couldn't get into it.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

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

satvikpendem 2y ago
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.
- atrus 2y ago
  It also convinced me to never join the army, because I was a bullet magnet haha.
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    Haha, I would never dream of actually getting shot at, lol.
  - switchbak 2y ago
    Operation Flashpoint (early version of ARMA) did that for me. You sneak around for an hour, then get shot in the face and it's all over. Imagine that, but for your life ... fuck war.
- ekidd 2y ago
  I remember speaking to several of the people who worked on America's Army back around 2007, when Counter-Strike was all the rage. I think this was at the GDC. The people I spoke with were from the Army. And they found CS-style games agonizing to watch. So many people running around with no plan, so much friendly fire, so many unrealistic tactics. You could practically see them shudder. They also had some people who worked in logistics. I remember one of them saying, "If the United States decides to invade a country, the software we wrote could calculate how much toilet paper we'd need."
  - wiseowise 2y ago
    Of course it is agonizing, CS doesn’t try to replicate real world scenario. In real life if you die - you die, you don’t get to respawn with $800.
    - 47282847 2y ago
      You sure?
      - wiseowise 2y ago
        I haven't tried it myself, but heard that this is indeed the case.
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  But by your own measure, you're not killing actual people, so why waste your time? Do you finally get it now?
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    My work is not killing actual people, so your analogy is flawed.
beeflet 2y ago
Gonna enlist and be the first man to rocket jump
- wiseowise 2y ago
  Finally my 14 years of TF2 will pay off. Do they have sticky bombs too?
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    Or Quake 3!
falcolas 2y ago
Practicing point and click skills probably won't to help much with your firearm accuracy. Or cardio.

Taek 2y ago

Its just fun. "Okay wth, today we're going to make the entire base solar powered" 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. But in Factorio? Nobody is using it so sure, make it bizzare. Change the rules, let yourself go. Don't test the design just send it. Bored? Too challenging? Don't bother finishing the design do something else.

dartos 2y ago
> 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.
- serf 2y ago
  >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. tl;dr : I remember when the fun Factorio game was qbasic.exe and no one blinked about it. We all had fun. (p.s. I love factorio now too)
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    Bring back counterculture hackers
    - tux3 2y ago
      What do you mean, back! There's more than ever! We're overflowing with talented peeps hacking on cool things, writing nice blogs publishing zines, and so forth and on! The formerly-counterculture conventions got so cult and big they grew a counter-counterculture of smaller places. Outside the walls of the AI SaaS grind. There be life.

highwind 2y ago

Just like any other video games, I like these type of management games because it's "work" without real-life consequences. I can play the min-max game without any unknowns that comes from real life management. Or I can destroy everything and mess everything up too. It's my escapism.

bigstrat2003 2y ago

I submit that if "but I could be doing something productive instead" is a common thought when you are trying to have fun, that is the problem and not Factorio. It's perfectly ok to just have fun and not build something meaningful.

uoaei 2y ago
Your implication that the definition of fun excludes meaningfulness is equally problematic.
- switchbak 2y ago
  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, not a universal truth as that word implies.
  - uoaei 2y ago
    problematic to the maintenance of a good-faith social contract
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      What is this contract?
      - uoaei 2y ago
        I find it hard to believe that faux dumbfounded naivete jives with the terms of the social contract.
satvikpendem 2y ago
I can have fun without needing to build anything meaningful at all though, but when the barriers get to close, that's when I start having an issue, in my experience. That's why I play games that don't replicate work in a sense.

hluska 2y ago

I wasn’t into video games for a long time for the exact reasons as you aren’t into Factorio. The ones I was interested in always felt too much like a job. Minecraft with a kid was my gateway drug and I got into Factorio really quickly after. It’s actually a really special game. There are elements of it that are practice for real world scenarios, but it is very relaxing, stress free and commitment free. It’s a great game to sit down with for an hour after work to decompress and become normal again. It’s also an incredibly fun game to share with a group of people on one device. That’s something I haven’t experienced since the 1990s, but it’s really enjoyable to get together with a group and build together. It’s an excellent cooperative game and is a great way to really get to know people. It’s even more fun when you play it with people from a range of professions - one of my favourite Factorio groups is a bartender, a cook, a lawyer and a software developer. We think differently but when it all comes together, it’s really neat. I understand that it’s not for everyone and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t have nearly the reflexes for FPS so we’re likely quite different in terms of the games we like. But I find it very relaxing and very enjoyable. It reminds me a lot of QBasic on an old Tandy - it’s that same thrill of tinkering because tinkering is fun.

satvikpendem 2y ago
I feel you, I used to play many single player games as well like Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, or Sly Cooper, over games that wanted me to expend significant brain power. They are still incredible games that don't have the same effect as Factorio does, they feel wholly different in their goals.

SigmundA 2y ago

I feel the same way sometimes, it definitely closer to the same loop of plan execute refactor then many games. I do find my self getting wrapped up into then backing off because it does feel like work. But I like the fact that I can see it working in realtime, its just pretty, this machine I built that I can zoom into and see the smallest detail actually working. Wish software was more like that, a good debugger can get closer to that but way more clunky and poor performing than Factorio.

exodust 2y ago
You're right. The intoxication of graphics and visual design in games can't be underestimated. It's more than a paint job or window dressing. It slots into the whole itch-scratching appeal and addiction. I agree debugging tools could make more use of visualisation. I remember the excellent HTML 3d view in Firefox, removed from version 47. For some reason we can't have nice things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqHV625EU3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqHV625EU3E Not sure if there's a way to get it back. I heard it's available in Edge, but I don't use that browser.

zen928 2y ago

Splitting from the experiences of others, I think the mentality somewhat comes down to your preference in what you seek to do in videogames and how you engage with them. In these types of sandbox building games, career developers naturally get somewhat of a "cheat" to becoming proficient quickly in that the mode of expressing logical sentiments will only ever be a few abstractions away from what you would do normally at your work, so you feel less constrained to building understanding of a system and can instead use the system as a way to output your ideas in a way faster than others might. In this sense, it's somewhat of a power fantasy that if you vs the average person were to play this game that you would most likely be able to clearly express your ideas and goals and be able to act on them, which makes it fun to go off the rails to show off "some crazy thing" you've made as a slight nod to your perceived skill being able to make these things. Consequently, that's why I'm so disinterested in learning these games. The discussion about them shifts into a thin one layer abstraction for other people to try to brag about their accomplishments and what they self injected as their experience instead of the game itself. This doesn't affect the gameplay, but it affects my perception of the game as a shallow vehicle for attention seekers more than it promotes the ideas of fun gameplay. That said, sometimes the style of gameplay resonates with a style of development you might have been interested in understanding more and can use it as a way to get motivation or inspiration for ideas. Automating pipelines, physics simulations, etc. I think it's always worth a shot on games that have notable recognition of quality to see if it jives with what you enjoy, but it's been the exception more than the rule in my case.

instalabs 2y ago

> Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead This is me, but extended to all games. I stopped playing games because I feel like I can always do something more productive with my time instead. If I really want to check out, I watch some TV instead. But games (especially modern ones) take too much work without any real reward.

luffy_t 2y ago

I feel exactly the same. I don't think the problems you solve in factorio are that complex, they are just tedious. It feels like calculations that a calculator can do. It is utterly boring to me personally, I can simply write a program or come up with a formula once I know what I need to make to calculate how much of everything I need. I also like to play simpler games which stimulates more of a lower part of my brain (motor control shit that feels good) no need to think too much in these game since I do a lot of that in my real life job. I have mostly been working on research problems where you can't generally write these rules for how to solve a particular subproblem and that feels like actual problem solving I just don't get when people say they love the problem solving aspect of the game. I mean if you think solving simple mathematical optimization problems that already have a solution "problem solving" then good for you. The average game time is too long and it is just not worth my time.

Dr4kn 2y ago
Ratios are one thing. To find a good tileable design, which is also UPS efficient, especially with beacons can get quite challenging
- luffy_t 2y ago
  It can be but my point is when you face those types of challenges in you work and solve them you realize how much better and satisfying those challenges are in real life compared to Factorio which takes away the fun part of playing it.
treflop 2y ago
I’m inclined to agree. I also don’t get people who look up YouTube videos on how to do things in Factorio. What’s the fun part left to do if you just use someone else’s factory or belt design?
- luffy_t 2y ago
  yes once you watch those videos it takes away the problem solving element as well.

p3rls 2y ago

I feel the same about when I play HoI4-- really winning a two-front war on ironman and building webapps have a lot of similarities.

balls187 2y ago

I feel the same. Factorio was fun for a small bit but it really just felt like a job, same with Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, etc. After beating prepatch PCR, I switched back to Call of Duty for a bit.

psygn89 2y ago
Same with me. When I was younger I was able to just enjoy myself without mixing irl thoughts. Unfortunately these days as an adult if I'm stuck in a game or have to chip at it in some tedious fashion, a part of my brain goes "you can spend this time learning something new or productive irl". I think my attitude changed the games I play also. I used to play MMO when I was younger but FPS games give me that dopamine rush without any commitments. Sadly it's only when I'm sick do I feel I'm able to just cozy up without these "you can be doing something else" thoughts and truly enjoy games for what they are, tedious or not.
- fwip 2y ago
  It's important to have time for yourself. You might want to think about scheduling some, if it feels like you can only really relax when you're sick.

imtringued 2y ago

This makes no sense to me. Doing productive things means 40 to 100 hour commitments with the possibility of your work being worthless at the end, because you didn't have enough time for that 40th or 100th hour, because you need to do a lot of upfront work, because you need specific hardware, because someone else did it better, because the maintainer rejected your pull request, because what you want to do actually takes 1000 hours. Now that is what I call tedious! Meanwhile open ended pvp multiplayer games can drain hundreds of hours with no feeling of accomplishment. Those are the games that make me feel I should be doing something more productive.

phito 2y ago
You have a very limited view on what being productive is. I have a home lab, I'd rather spend an hour or two improving it and learning things along the way rather than playing factorio.

chatmasta 2y ago

Some of my most overengineered code was written after a Factorio session… maybe it’s better treated as an outlet for some urges to which you shouldn’t acquiesce :)

discordance 2y ago

My day job is mostly CRUD or calling APIs. I trained my brain for many years to do more than that and Factorio satisfies that urge.

doctorwho42 2y ago
This. But for me it was moving into management instead of production. I don't really get to CAD/design in my day job, focusing on one of two projects with my mind for weeks on end. Instead I manage others and troubleshoot problems that arise that become impediments for my team. I also live in an apartment, so facotrio/building games are my outlet. Minimal impact on the environment, I get my design and building fix, and I can always stand up and walk away without much clean up.

bemmu 2y ago

I love Factorio, because in real life it's difficult to fully automate things so abstractly. It's so wonderfully simple to think that oh this thing goes here, is combined with this and this... profit. You then walk away from the game, inspired to apply such process-thinking to your actual work and life, and realize that it's actually rare to be able to do.

brundolf 2y ago

Not the same, but Slay the Spire could be described as a "programmatic game". I play it when I just need to burn some spare cycles (especially if programming is inaccessible to me at the moment, like when I only have my phone)

ivanjermakov 2y ago
I think there is a quite big player intersection between Factorio and Slay the Spire, despite being completely different genres. And I agree that StS is a nice way to relax from programming.

asjir 2y ago

reminds of me of this quote from the Tao of programming: https://farosaves.com/375baf1e-cc1c-4f02-8a7c-35eaba25d94d https://farosaves.com/375baf1e-cc1c-4f02-8a7c-35eaba25d94d

gloosx 2y ago

Do your work feels like you have infinite resources which you need to extract, connect and spend on building a fully automated planet-size megafactory all by yourself while fighting local roaches and acid-spitting bugs? What kind of work it is? Ironically the game goal is to leave that place :D

consp 2y ago

> I never got into these types of programmatic games for precisely this reason but I'd like to understand other perspectives on this. Everything you describe requires interaction with people. Those are too often toxic, incompetent, overly demanding and keep changin schedules and priorities. At least in single player games you get to drop all that crap.

medstrom 2y ago

Exactly how I feel with redstone contraptions in Minecraft. Already have OSS projects to my name, and my way to "play" is to refactor them endlessly. In a game I'm looking for a different type of fun for once.

newswasboring 2y ago

For me it's because it looks pretty. The light and sounds of factorio are so much fun. Trains going zoom, research centers going zip etc. I wish real programming tools were this much fun.

pjerem 2y ago

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 chaotically beautiful buildings. (Don’t think I want to start a debate, I loved the 3 games and played them a lot, it’s just that Satisfactory won my heart… even the name is great).

gambiting 2y ago
Same here. Played both, both are extremely satisfying to play, but Satisfactory is just..... pretty. It's nice to take a break from building the factory to just explore the world too.
dbacar 2y ago
IMHO, Factorio is aesthetically beautiful.
- pjerem 2y ago
  In a stylistic way, yes. Not in the « what a beautiful multi floor truck station I built there, oh and btw, take this stair then on the mezzanine, take the door at the left to access the commands of the station. » way. It’s just different games. Factorio is excellent as building production lines while Satisfactory is excellent as making feel you « in » your creations with 3D, a lot of architectural options, a really immersive sound design (quitting your noisy machine room to a corridor and hearing the sound go down when the door closes). It’s different. But there is one important common thing with Factorio though : they are both made with a lot of love and with a lot of attention to every detail. In fact, both games could be an exemple of design and ergonomics for even professional softwares.
ffsm8 2y ago
You might want to try Dyson sphere program next ( ◔ ‿ ◔ )
2y ago

ivanjermakov 2y ago

It does feel like work, but that's okay! Some mechanics are mundane than others, e.g. compare clearing enemy bases to designing rail blueprints, but the game does everything to make it efficient and ejoyable: high performance, keyboard shortcuts, immense amount of quality of life features - all you get when devs love playing the game themselves. And, even Factorio being my favorite game, I still need to take a long breaks from it because building a factory is a lot of mental effort.

RandomThoughts3 2y ago

It’s funny because I don’t enjoy Factorio for the same reason you do - it quickly feels like work - but I never get the feeling I could be doing something more productive instead. I just think the core gameplay loop of Factorio is tedious and that it’s specifically designed for people who don’t mind that. The gameplay is fun at first. You have a ressource and something you want to produce. You look at the ratio of things, what the layout you will have to put in place, how fast things will have to move. You painfully build that. It works. You feel good. Then you realise it will just be more of the same ad infinity with the first time you do train design and liquids the sole inkling of novelty. It’s all fairly simple conceptually so it gets tedious and boring quite fast (at least to me). I think part of the issue is also that I tend to play it wrong by calculating and planning - literally work for which the in game tooling is not optimal - while I think I would have more fun just winging it and fixing things as they happen. What I mean is I think it’s not a game for everyone but I can see why it’s catnip for its intended audience.

Filligree 2y ago
If that’s how you want to play it, there are mods such as factory planner which will support that playstyle. Meanwhile, yeah, at least half my time is spent working around earlier mistakes. A main bus always works, but spaghetti is what makes the game fun.
fwip 2y ago
If you're looking for more novelty, there are a lot of mods that add cool new complexities. I like the Seablock pack - the core premise is that you crash land on a water world, and need to extract all your resources from water. The production loops are much more complicated (you start having to deal with byproduct management just an hour or two in), but in return there's almost no enemy time pressure. It also includes some ingame recipe-planner mods, so it's easier to plan-then-build.
- RandomThoughts3 2y ago
  The core gameplay loop is still very much the same. More complex recipe is not really a more complex game. It just means more of the same planning and calculation but with more variables - which is to say more tedium not more fun.

taneq 2y ago

Same, I get to a certain stage in the game (usually the first big factory 'refactor') and find myself thinking that the exact same effort I'm applying to the game could be applied to any number of work-related things that would be just as fun and much more beneficial.

billfruit 2y ago

On the other hand, what bother me about factorio is its deterministic nature. Perhaps it would be more fun with more random elements like equipment failures etc.

bjackman 2y ago

I get the same feeling with increasingly many games as I get older. It started with games that are basically engineering work. But now it's anything with resource management or long-term strategic thinking (basically whenever I think "hmm, I need to note down my thoughts so I can pick up my strategy where I left of next time I play").

archerx 2y ago

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 is Rocket League, everything else feels slow and boring or I could be using this energy for something else. Not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse.

aniviacat 2y ago
> I’m putting all this effort into this game and at the end I won’t really have anything to show for it You will have something to show for it: Joy. If your only interest is to invest effort into producing something that provides some kind of physical value, then of course work will be more interesting than games. Development has fun parts and it has tedious parts. The tedious parts are what usually makes for a good product. Factorio removes that part; because it is not about producing a product, it's about having fun. > Not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse. That's up to you, but for me it'd be a curse, not being able to do thing just for fun anymore, because of always feeling a pressure to be productive.
- armada651 2y ago
  > Development has fun parts and it has tedious parts. The tedious parts are what usually makes for a good product. Factorio removes that part; because it is not about producing a product, it's about having fun. Factorio also has tons of tedious parts. It really isn't all that different in that regard in my experience. There are many games these days that are designed to have a certain element of tediousness (grind) in them, because this gives you the sense of being productive without actually producing anything. > That's up to you, but for me it'd be a curse, not being able to do thing just for fun anymore, because of always feeling a pressure to be productive. I don't think they mean to say they always feel a pressure to be productive. If it costs you exactly the same amount of energy and you get the same amount of joy from it, then why would you not choose an activity that produces something of enduring value?

kwar13 2y ago

That sums up how I feel about it. I can see the appeal, but for that kind of mental effort I rather just keep coding.

wlesieutre 2y ago

Not just you, I had the same experience with Factorio. Other building games like Minecraft I could play for days, but Factorio stresses me out. I want to chill and make cool stuff, optimizing a factory while fending off aliens wasn’t relaxing.

chasing 2y ago

Haha. Yeah, I’m working on logic puzzles all day for work. The games I play to relax are either shoot-everything games or, like, MarioKart. I need to chill and not think.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

That's the feeling I get when I see day traders on Eve Online.

grogenaut 2y ago

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

TheRealPomax 2y ago

This is why Satisfactory works for me, but factorio doesn't: even though it's supposedly also a factory buildering, it's really much more of a world exploration game that happens to have factory building, but you don't have to build "a perfect factory" to get anything done, or unlock things that let you explore better. I can just throw down some buildings and link them up haphazardly and that strategy kind of works all the way up to near-enough-to-the-end to keep the game a fun running/driving/flying with occasional bouts of production line management, rather than feeling like I'm just doing work that a computer could do way better.

vl 2y ago

I felt same way after playing bunch of American Truck Simulator. Why I’m doing this? I can just go and drive real car instead!

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