How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
86 comments
·October 26, 2024satvikpendem
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.
Taek
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
> 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
>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
I don't understand, I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose, and it can still be impactful, depending on the user. It feels way more impactful than anything I can make in Factorio or similar.
delichon
This behavior is known as "play". Many of us find it stimulating. If it doesn't work for you you have my sympathy.
duckmysick
> I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose
Such freedom is extremely rare when you get paid for writing or maintaining software.
dasil003
Not everything is about impact.
highwind
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
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.
satvikpendem
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.
uoaei
Your implication that the definition of fun excludes meaningfulness is equally problematic.
switchbak
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.
SigmundA
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.
hluska
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
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.
AtlasBarfed
Fps: the US military thanks you for training for infantry in your spare time.
satvikpendem
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.
ekidd
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."
atrus
It also convinced me to never join the army, because I was a bullet magnet haha.
DonHopkins
But by your own measure, you're not killing actual people, so why waste your time?
Do you finally get it now?
Xeronate
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.
OrigamiPastrami
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.
The other aspect is there are plenty of people that like to think like programmers, but have no experience programming and the barrier to entry for a videogame is substantially lower than even figuring out a "hello world!" program for someone who wouldn't even know how to pick a programming language.
cole-k
Your comparison hits home for me. I have been playing guitar on-and-off for over a decade (OK, maybe more like trying to play guitar) and I still really enjoy Guitar Hero.
It's instant gratification: I don't have as much fun practicing at .75x speed with a metronome to learn the hard part of a piece. Instead a video game tells me how great I am at "guitar" by being able to push buttons and strum on the beat, not to mention that I hear the sounds of my favorite songs come out when I do it.
For a similar reason, I like Rocksmith (guitar hero but with a real guitar), but the gratification is not quite so instant. They gamify the practicing part but I still need to do it, otherwise the part I'm playing actually sounds bad. And sight-reading is so much harder when there are more than 5 buttons.
scarecrowbob
As someone that plays music professionally and who enjoyed Rock Band, I think that the issue is a lot of folks find satisfaction in matering skills and checking off boxes that other folks design for them.
Designing a satisfying skill progression takes a lot of work. I know what I will have to do if I, say, take up mandolin again seriously, and it's daunting- and worse, maybe it won't even lead to a satisfying or useful end... I will still do that at some point. I had the same feeling about cello or pedal steel guitar, and they all turned out okay.
At the same time I totally understand why following simple tutorials, running a preset course, climbing an established route, riding already-cleared bike trails, or playing a video game with few possible outcomes can be satisfying.
IggleSniggle
The problem with side projects is that they do not have a well defined goal. Or they do, in which case something like Factorio won't have any appeal because you can just work on something more meaningful instead. Factorio is for people who want to keep programming but are too frustrated or cynical about the real world to do it there. If the real world was better, they would do it there. If the real world could be fixed with programming, they would do it there. Many have tried, only to discover that what they thought were technical problems are really people problems.
aphantastic
Mindusry scratches the same itch, but in perhaps a slightly more appealing way for me at least. Rather than the entire game being dedicated to creating one massive monolith dedicated to the one goal of rocket building or whatever, there are many different levels each where you’re just playing classic tower defense and using the layout of the map to your advantage to extract resources and kill bad guys. It’s casual and FOSS.
runeblaze
Same here. Also Factorio AFAIK has no good copilot. Sadly the best LLMs are not fine-tuned on Factorio so my productivity takes a massive hit when moving from side projects to Factorio.
thih9
Are there any popular games with copilot like AI suggestions being part of the core gameplay?
Retr0id
I can't tell if you're being serious or not here lol
indigoabstract
Lol. My parser failed at this step, so I had to look it up:
Dylan16807
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?
oersted
I do get the appeal of games, it is one of my long-time passions, but indeed that's the issue with games like Factorio specifically, they feel too much like work, so might as well do work.
dietr1ch
This, long ago a roomate got into Factorio and after figuring out the basics ended up admitting that it felt way too much like work. This has been my reason to stay out of Factorio even though plenty of people have recommended it to me. I did a short collaborative run of Mindustry and I feel I don't need to play Factorio, plus, Counter-Strike chugs all my playing time, to me it's a bit like cocaine made a game and except for griding aim, it scratches all the right spots in my (smooth?) brain.
It's the trucking game for truckers in my mind, only a madman would play it after work.
yieldcrv
I feel the same about another pretty chill game, Dave the Diver. It has a great feedback loop, at the beginning
Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
IggleSniggle
Dave the Diver just turns into a slog is all. It's fantastic at the start when everything is novel, and all the systems hold promise. But the systems themselves turn out to not have good gameplay loops, so right around the underwater village it starts to kinda suck, which ironically is right around when all the systems are mature enough that to play well you have a giant list of "todo" items across a variety of systems, many of which you may find boring, but are obliged to interact with anyway, sort of like real life.
The advantage a game like factorio has over DtD is that you can kind of abandon huge sections and "start fresh" while still collecting rent from the work you did earlier to fund your new excursions. I guess DtD does this to a degree, but there's a lot less freedom of intellectual movement.
This is why I like Against the Storm. It is a novel (if familiar) challenge every time, and every time you "beat the odds" the game forces you to move on to the next harder challenge, "you beat this puzzle, you need a harder on."
bigstrat2003
> Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
Life is a slog if approached that way. Spending your time chasing more money instead of enjoying life is the quickest way to have a miserable existence.
MarkMarine
The stakes (there are none except ones you set for yourself)
The timeline (quick returns, but a long scale of challenges you can build up to. Lots of side projects out there with 0 users.)
You can play with friends
You can also pay 1/4 attention until you need to design something complex in the game. I find it fun, I can turn my brain off for a bit but then re/engage for the fun complex stuff.
I stopped playing as much myself because I wanted to either work on professional development (side projects, learning more) or actually make things with my hands (woodworking, chair making, fixing an old truck) that were real breaks from software engineering, and easier to share with my kids.
TechDebtDevin
I feel guilty every time I turn on Factorio and basically no longer play it because I know I could have just as much enjoyment building something for the real world.
dpkirchner
I've yet to find something I can do in the real world that's as enjoyable, accessible, affordable, and easy to pick up and put down as Factorio, or similar games (that scratch a "builder" itch). What sort of things do you have in mind?
* edited for clarity, typos
bigstrat2003
Factorio is more fun than any side project. While it hits a similar area of the brain as programming does (the problem solving zone), it's definitely not the same.
dowakin
BTW "Factorio: Space Age" was release a few days ago. Personally, I'm going to spend whole Sunday playing it :)
DonHopkins
I've started a new Space Age game, too!
With the understanding that you can regularly leave Factorio running overnight or even all week to build up resources, how many hours have other hard core Factorio players logged?
My Factorio play time is up to 6,573.2 hours at this point.
I love Factorio for the same reasons I love SimCity. 6,573.2 hours seems like a lot of time, but I've probably logged even more hours playing SimCity since 1989. (But much of that was actual productive time porting it to various platforms, testing, debugging, and optimizing the actual source code and user interface, etc.)
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
chasd00
I get a real kick out of playing builder games with my son. We played Jurassic park evolution a lot, I would direct contracts and what to build and then we’d discuss and he would build it. Heh it was like being team lead without the pressure and anxiety.
perihelions
The primary source is
https://www.ft.com/content/b9e419c6-acf1-420b-8ae6-908feb52c... ("How ‘Factorio’ seduced Silicon Valley — and me")
(Cool fourth-wall breaking moment seeing an HN'er featured in the FT!)
dang
(We moved this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41954555)
Three HNers (at least!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xal
KaoruAoiShiho
Is there a better graphics version of factorio? And no I don't mean Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program though those are good games in their own rights, I mean something with the same level of depth and camera as factorio.
ekidd
I guess it depends on what you mean by "better graphics"? They're upgraded their graphics several times over the years. I'm playing on a 4K monitor and they're using most of those pixels. I can see a small amount of interpolation at full zoom at 4K.
If you zoom in, the graphics are high-res 2D sprites, rendered from 3D models. And the level of detail can be ridiculous. From this week's Factorio 2.0 update (and Space Age add-on), here's an example of the zoomed-in detail: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-396 See the foundry animations? Those videos are actually slightly more blurred than the in-game version. And the sound effects are synced to specific animation frames.
So the world of Factorio is oftentimes brown and grim and covered in grime, but that's a conscious artistic choice. (Not all of the new planets are brown. Gleba is green and irridescent and frankly creepy.) Similarly, Factorio's 2D nature has allowed the developers to focus on gameplay and quality-of-life more than many newer games in the genre. If you want to build big, intricate factories with complex train networks, for example, Factorio really shines.
If anyone would like a game with 3D graphics, or a different graphics style, try:
- Satisfactory: The 3D world is gorgeous, and Satisfactory shines at "walk around inside your factory and tinker with it." Gameplay-wise, it has only recently gained blueprinting tools that allow working at a medium level of abstraction.
- Shapez 2.0: This is pretty and colorful and full of great little puzzles. It occupies a different part of the game-design space and is just a joy to play.
(Dyson Sphere Project and Captain of Industry also have great gameplay, but I don't know if their graphics are likely to grab people who find Factorio graphically underwhelming.)
solardev
What kinda depth are you missing from DSP and Satisfactory? And what do you mean by "camera"?
There's also Shapez 1 and 2, which is like the essence of Factorio abstracted into shapes and colors. Shapez 2 has more mining and trains and multiple levels.
MarkMarine
I haven’t found one, and really as you get later in the game the retro graphics are a blessing. I play on my work Mac (most powerful thing in the house) and I end up having to bail early because I just can’t have a megabase over a certain size, everything grinds to a halt.
dcre
Better in what sense?
philsnow
I love Factorio but the graphics look a bit like 1996 SVGA 256-color sprites (edit: by which I mean, I feel like there is noticeable dithering). I haven't played the new "Factorio in space" bits, maybe it gets out of the browns-and-beige color palette a bit more?
btmiller
I love the art for two reasons:
1. It’s simple, charming, and nostalgic.
2. I view it as a defense mechanism against the onslaught of modern gaming that’s locked in a race to the lowest common denominator (i.e. “Stay away! This game isn’t for you!” ;) )
marcosdumay
You don't like the design aesthetic?
Because your phrased your question like people that complain about the level of detail. Yes, factorio is ugly (although some trees are beautiful). And yes, that's a design decision.
There are some mods that reskin it. Personally, I don't think any of them are beautiful.
duskwuff
> by which I mean, I feel like there is noticeable dithering
Any chance you have the game set to use 16-bit color?
Centigonal
You could replace this whole article with https://xkcd.com/356/
Also, if you like Factorio Youtube videos, I'm a big fan of https://www.youtube.com/@DoshDoshington
dangsux
[dead]
https://archive.is/2sRrE