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.
"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.
> 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.
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
Hear, hear. I would tell you all about the tools my household runs on but it is as you say. Still gives me a lot of satisfaction to make stuff that makes life better, and for someone more adventurous than me it might also be something you can use to try out new technologies or build something for on your CV. The only downside is that internet connectivity being down means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it and better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way!
Phones being unreliable and making data-tossing decisions without your involvement is indeed the complaint I meant to share. It has been a pet peeve about Android since day one and it has only gotten worse (websites like dontkillmyapp come to mind); would hope that being aware of the downsides helps us fix or reliably work around the issue one day
I don't understand the first point though, do you mean I should set up remote access? Because that's definitely there, it's just that if the uplink is down on the ISP's side or whatever, then you can't access the system outside the house. Or if I were to host it outside the house, then you just shift the SPOF to a different location. What are you suggesting or pointing out exactly?
> Any changes will be updated when you next get back home [...] removing need for the cloud
More than one person can be in the grocery store. Syncing a file does not work because you overwrite each other's changes; this is what we started with but this is why I made (what I call) multiplayer groceries in the first place
And note that I also don't need a "cloud"; it's hosted on my own system rather than someone else's
That's... the situation as described in the post which the comment above you was responding to?
> The only downside is that internet connectivity being down means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it
Wireguard or Tailscale Inc. are not magically going to resolve that situation. Does Tailscale even work locally if your internet is down or does it require their cloud for NAT punching regardless of whether you're on the server's LAN? For starters
We keep a postit list next to the breadmaker and write stuff down when we need to get something. Then when it is time to go shopping, we simply peel off the list and away we go.
I am getting disgusted by people who need to have that screen in their hand, all waking hours.
I won't go so far as to say I'm disgusted by what others do, but I am increasingly resenting having to use my phone for myriad tasks that shouldn't require a phone in the first place. Like unlocking my apartment door. It's obviously so that someone can get a recurring cut where they would have once provided a one-time semi-permanent solution (like a key, or a notepad).
I mean, maybe some of this will be blunted over time as open source slowly eats away at these utilities, but until then I view my phone like a grenade, or a drug, or a slot machine, or a money-eater.
My apartment recently moved over to “smart locks” and I immediately noped out (app is slow), choosing to memorize the codes instead. This was clearly an afterthought since about 40% of the time touches are missed when using the keypads.
Why anyone wanted to unlock their door with their phone instead of tapping a fob, I’m not sure, but the only interesting feature (temp access for friends) doesn’t seem worth it.
"Why anyone wanted to unlock their door with their phone instead of tapping a fob, "
I would want to do it with my phone because then I only have to have one thing to carry around with me. I haven't carried a key ring in years. I don't even carry a wallet these days. It's really quite useful. Way fewer trips back to fetch the keys/wallet, etc.
> I would want to do it with my phone because then I only have to have one thing to carry around with me.
I would prefer this to be a keyring over a phone for aforementioned reasons. Secondly, the app is buggy and often just fails to work. Third, it takes a good deal of time to take out the phone and fumble around with the software.
I rarely need to open the software to make my car open the door automatically. Once in a blue moon I need to actually open the app to force it to connect. I actually can't remember the last time I needed to do that. It's normally completely seamless. The phone stays in my pocket - the doors unlock when I'm nearby, and lock when I leave.
That's my experience of course, other car apps might be much different. But that's an issue with the implementation, not the concept.
Maybe, but if you really don’t want to carry stuff around then it’s optimal to just type the code in (…which is why it makes zero sense that the keypads suck. except that they were being cheap.)
Then what I'm carrying around is a bunch of codes in my head which is its own form of baggage, or I re-use the codes and that comes with the same risks as reusing passwords has. Using the phone for everything has risks too, but I think not much differently than a password manager does, and most phones I've used have a reasonable device recovery process (not that I've had to use them or have expertise in that area...).
Carrying a single thing (which has a bunch of other uses than just access control) doesn't feel like a burden to me.
That said, I don't disagree at all that the typical keypad for access control on everything pretty much sucks. My front door has like 4 buttons only and does the telephone keyboard thing of using the same button for multiple 'numbers' in your code. Time to jump on amazon to look for a decent front door lock that works with my phone :)
> It's obviously so that someone can get a recurring cut
As the person who started this discussion about needing software for household things, let me be clear that this is not the sort of situation I'm talking about! The things I use, I either made or maintain myself because it's my hobby. Nobody needs to use them who doesn't want to and there is no cut. I think the conversation diverges here as this is not the same situation! Probably anyone would agree that being forced to use something or other is very different from being able to use something or other.
In the part of the world where I currently live there are cafes/restaurants that have a menu ONLY in the form a QR code that leads to some shitty slow and laggy webpage with the actual menu. I can't express how much I hate this.
Why do I even need a smartphone the go to a restaurant and eat something? Why would anyone effectively refusing service to people who don't have smartphones or do not want to use them? If I need their service and have money to pay for it why would they put additional obstacles in my way? What's their motivation for scaring of a potential customer using totally arbitrary criteria that has nothing to do with the service they provide?
This. And then getting shouted at or (less than politely) talked down to for wanting to talk to the staff for how they deal allergies. Only to finally load the menu, show them the information isn’t there, and promptly walk out.
My apologies that using available technology to improve upon suboptimal solutions disgusts you. In case it helps to know why "that screen" improves upon paper in the first place:
- I'm not always home when I decide to want to buy something, so then I couldn't write it on that paper
- We go shopping together most of the time. That screen lets you check items off and sync that to the other person's that screen. Alternatively, there is a mode where it gives each participant a subset of the items so you don't get duplicate things
- That screen can give you the list in the right order if you just tell the app one time what layout a store has (e.g. first the bread and breakfast things, then the cooling section, then the freezer section.. those sorts of categories)
- That screen can also work with a map function where it does a traveling salesperson problem to find a good path to walk down to get each item, but this requires entering the location of everything rather than just having everything broadly categorized
- That screen suggests things you frequently buy, so it's one tap for what you commonly need
- That screen can temporarily hide items you are going to get in the next store, so you can glance and see that the list is clear and you're good to go check out and then unhide the things when you enter the next store
- That screen can automatically add items from recipes you've added
- You have that screen anyway. The pen and paper, on the other hand, are consumables
We could forego all these benefits for, eh, not being "glued", whatever the advantage in that is. It's not like I'm getting distracted by notifications in the store if that's what you're worried about
I'm getting the distinct impression that handwriting human language may be beyond the basic capabilities of the Modern Human.
Seems to be memory and basic cognitive difficulties such as "sorting" whatever that means when actually buying the stuff in the store. I've been buying stuff in stores constantly for 50 years and I'm very fast, without aid.
But boy howdy these devices sound like just the tool for people with actual cognitive difficulties; we should make definitely sure that they have them. Might be a problem though on the data entry side.
Yeah, as a last resort that is a good suggestion. On a proper computer you could even use "save page as" and have it run the javascript so you can use all of the functionality (e.g., checking items off, or temporarily hiding when you're planning to get them in the next store) except that the syncing will fail until you get back home, which would be okay then.
It's a rare situation though, otherwise it would have been worth it to make a proper app that caches all data locally rather than a webpage
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
Some people, like myself, enjoy writing code but need a purpose to write code. If I don’t have a reason, or problem to solve, I can’t just sit down and start coding.
Honestly, that fits into the same boat for me. I like fixing problems for people and I’m not particularly creative in the classical sense. So messing with visual effects for the sake of it doesn’t really do it for me. Weirdly, if someone needed it for something, I’d probably pull a 60 hour shift to figure it all out ;-P
I mean, what is “useful” in the sense of “paying the bills” is quite different from “useful” in the sense of social utility - and what you _perceive_ as social utility is a whole other thing on top of that, that’s only _hopefully_ somewhat aligned with the actual thing.
Working on something that feels like it’s only useful as a way to extract money is incredibly unrewarding in my experience, to the point of increasing my feeling of burnout.
Useful does not mean mass appeal. The software I got paid the most to write is used by a handful of people on a manufacturing site and 99.9999999999% of the public will never see it.
It solved a problem they had and I’m proud of it but yea it’s incredibly niche and useful to a very select few people.
I don’t disagree and, to be honest, that kind of work is something I really enjoy.
I’m mostly, personally, talking about building toy apps or hacking my microwave to play Doom. Not throwing shade at those who do, it’s just not what motivates me.
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.
> It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo
I think about this whenever I see a new open source library hosted on its own domain with a polished and slick promo material. I really don't mean to throw shade at designers for making nice designs, but it just feels weird and corporate-y to me that the polish is a priority.
There are, of course, open source projects that serve as a hook for selling SaaS products, which is corporate by nature and thus doesn't trigger the same feeling in me.
the permaculture of: patches in emails; binaries on usenet; releases / of sources on maybe less savoury personal web sites
otoh lack of basically centralized source control / git / hub / lab etc would also be missed dearly
depending on context: corporate polish can be fine; especially if software "is infra"; let truly (?) fun inconsequential software be messy and / or fun if sparks joy
apropos permaculture: i enjoyed TIS-100 but never got interested by factorio (maybe its art?) but anyways i'd personally find it more interesting to see more declarative / triggered simulation / play out in ever interesting ways
so maybe biologic systems over industry in space?
maybe there exist such games already? they do in my mind at least; i should look into current simulation frameworks maybe and read up on ecology
TIS-100 was one example of the general context of "programming in games" or "games as programming" which I've actually played and enjoyed. I get that Factorio has a different game loop and broader sandbox than TIS-100, so I can see where you're coming from. Factorio, on the outset however, hasn't quite gripped me. Again, it might be this particular one's art and overall setup, but TBH I also think that outside of constrained puzzling as you say, I'm much more inclined to work on all those little side projects desperately waiting for attention...
In some ways, this reminds me of Guitar Hero and its set of games. As great as those are for getting into music, once you're already into it, it can feel like time that could have been better spent on deliberate practice or at least some good old jamming for fun. I do love games, as long as they don't take up too much time and have an ending. In an earlier life I've already burned plenty of midnight oil on similarly "open ended" play (4X and other strategy or construction games are the worst traps for me). I'd rather finish BG3 at some point - at least that one has a definitive end to the player's story and is a bit more of a change of scenery from what I do for a living (building and optimizing systems).
Then again... maybe I'll finally try Satisfactory which I own through Humble Choice IIRC; or maybe I should avoid doing that at all costs for the reasons above... ;)
Not long after his immersion in LIFE, Gosper himself got a glimpse of the limits of the tight circle the hackers had drawn. It happened in the man-made daylight of the 1972 Apollo 17 moon shot. He was a passenger on a special cruise to the Caribbean, a “science cruise” timed for the launch, and the boat was loaded with sci-fi writers, futurists, scientists of varying stripes, cultural commentators, and, according to Gosper, “an unbelievable quantity of just completely empty-headed cruise-niks.”
Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky’s party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes of Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper with his Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with the Indonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat.
Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sitting three miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all the arguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff—why not watch it on television, since you’ll be miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, he appreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides. The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers broke from their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some flaming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned into trances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper later recalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, “like some kind of sacrifice.”
The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future—yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large—certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation—all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing.
Gosper’s revelation led him to believe that the hackers could change things—just make the computers bigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that. While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, a magical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological Walden Pond, something was essentially lacking.
The world.
As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. The movement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in the seventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to ask for specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research were drying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would have directly increased the government’s ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and at home). Minsky thought the policy was a “losing” one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But there was no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. And slowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computer studies, the Institute’s attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to look for teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratic hassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses.
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
Thundering towers blasting into space is a primal thrill... but what if the hackers can do all of that with some aluminum foil, duct tape, and other things found in every garage workshop?
Big and flashy bets are expensive, many small bets are a far, far better way to explore the design space, especially now that we can share all the results with almost no cost.
The hacker culture is still there but hacker social media (unless carefully curated) is flooded with optimized content to the point where the cool stuff is hard to find and you only see the grifter techs.
There’s loads of hacker spirit still alive in the homelab and home automation space just to give one example.
Having lots of fun tinkering with Proxmox, Wled, Shelly devices to manipulate electric rollers, and more. Couldn’t quite get Valetudo running on my robot vacuum (my model isn’t the easiest to hack) but the concept is so cool. Triggering automations With dirt cheap NFC tags or a cheap wireless numpad is so satisfying.
Building an *arr stack is another area where there’s tons of amazing creativity online and the hacker spirit still lives on.
You don't even have to look per se. The YouTube aglo provides me a lot of interesting content that isn't especially high quality or production value. I do take an effort to ignore click bait as much as possible and click "don't recommend channel" for things like MKBHD and LTT, because those crowd out original content if you let them.
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.
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
In Factorio, the things you make don't need to have *any* appeal. It's just fun.
If you have more fun making random wonky software, that's great for you and I'm happy for you. But I personally find Factorio to be more fun than software when I'm trying to enjoy my days off. (at least, some of the time. Sometimes I have fun making software too but only if I have that 'itch'. With Factorio, it's fun even if I don't have an itch)
The core of Git is incredibly simple and elegant (content addressable database). It's an amazing approach to how to represent the data that needs representing.
The UI is the challenging bit, and that's because Linus just slapped something on to demonstrate it, expecting that a proper UI would be built over the plumbing he'd created.
Used? Certainly. Well loved? Oh boy do I disagree.
I think it's an extremely powerful tool, and it's worth knowing how to wield it well, but that power comes at the expense of user friendliness, especially for junior devs who don't have an intuition of git internals and how commands map to them.
Rebasing, reflogs, pickaxes, 3 way merges, merge directions, the fact that merge directions are reversed during rebases, are all weird things that are pretty specific to git.
At least as far as how they’re presented
> First time I hear such nonsense
You don’t seem to listen very closely. Linus himself recognized git’s perceived weirdness in a talk he gave about it years ago.
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.
When I asked Kovařík about this, he brought up Euro Truck Simulator, a wilfully mundane game about hauling cargo. The developers, who are friends of his, once told him that many of their most enthusiastic players are ... truckers. Truckers who spend their time off from their trucking jobs pretending to do more trucking ... a lot of people actually enjoy the work they do. They just don’t always enjoy their jobs that much, because of all the things that get in the way of the work.
If you like Power Wash Simulator, you'll LOVE the relaxing meditative idle game Paint Drying Simulator, and the exquisite organic fractal patina of its sequel, Paint Peeling Simulator. ;)
No, it’s boring to use cheap personal attacks (like I responded to) instead of actually engaging. If I wanted to read that, I could find it in YouTube comments.
I figured out a good cadence; first threads discuss a schema and sketch/iterate over an ERD and C4 diagram. Then we have threads to build modules on top of a framework. It knows if we're working with python/typer/pydantic or go or typescript and various frameworks/design decisions... Key is keeping topics separate so contexts don't overrun. And be explicit to say "don't re-generate code just talk high level" etc.
It depends on whether you make software for a living or for OSS. One does not preclude the other, even if one is rarer. Given my situation, as I had initially stated, I am part of the latter. Even still, were I the former, I still don't get why one would work "for free" basically, especially in terms of a game versus real life.
If you’re building oss with no users, or just for yourself, you’re functionally doing something more like art than coding in terms of how you prioritize and execute.
Here's to hoping things like Patreon and GitHub Sponsors make it more common. These platforms could truly change the way things are done in the software world. Given enough sponsors, I could quit my job and focus on free software every day.
Of course not. I think you misunderstand, if a game is too similar to real life, I am unsure why I should play it, whereas if it is fairly different, such as an FPS, it becomes much more fun for me. My question is primarily on the former, of why people seem to play a game that basically is like work but has no benefit for them. If it's fun for them, then that's fine, but my question more, why is it fun for them in the first place? That's really what I want to figure out.
Sometimes it's fun to do things when there's no real world consequence attached to failure and experimentation even if the mechanics are similar to something we do for work.
I sometimes do project euler puzzles for fun. I'm a CS professor - this starts to feel kinda close to my job. But it's relaxing and there's no pressure and no one is affected when I screw up; I just get to keep kicking at it, or put it down. The freedom makes a big difference.
The "solving an interesting problem" part of my job is the part I love. It's the other stuff I need a break from sometimes. :)
I think I can answer this to some extend. I kinda feel like you do, that playing factorio is time that I could more productively spend on side projects (especially considering how much time it costs), but I don’t kill bugs in side projects, don’t build train lines, don’t build spaceships. I play factorio because the dopamine hit when something comes together is nearly the same, but the actions I take are different enough to stay fun.
Also, I just think it’s good to not look at something that’s too much like work once in a while. Even if factorio is closer than many other things.
It's fun to solve problems. How do I optimize this sub-factory? - That's the same fun as "how do I optimize this function" but instead of a green light from my test runner one gets a colorful display of a working factory with a visible result. The fact that I reduced memory usage of that function by 10% I don't see in that way. And probably both both are equal in benefit to humanity's progress (zero)
> 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.
Sue you do. And you’re not obliged to keep it in some workable form just because they use it, they can use something else.
>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.
More counter-examples: LaTeX, vim, Regex, Blender, SAP, most Unix CLIs...
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.
I think a lot about this in the context of video game minmaxers/netdeckers who just copy a researched, optimal behaviour. It's completely alien to me but some people really get a kick out of just being an implementer, following rote instructions exactly to the letter.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
> Factorio also has tons of tedious parts. It really isn't all that different in that regard in my experience.
I would say that the only boring part is before you get bots. Then your role shifts from builder to designer. All the tools given to you (ctrl+c/x, up/downgrade planners, rail autocomplete, ...) just make building effortles, and most of your time is spent in design, analyzing and debugging your factory, while the changes are done for you as you work.
You're discounting the joy you get from actually solving a problem for yourself and other people which can provide serious long term satisfaction and monetary rewards.
For diversion, I try disconnecting from screens and doing something healthy that involves the use of my physical body. I find walking, hiking, swimming and running very enjoyable. I'm also a big fan of tennis, racquetball and table tennis. I still play video games occasionally when there's not an option to engage with the physical world for diversion but I really prefer chess to most modern video games.
> You're discounting the joy you get from actually solving a problem for yourself and other people which can provide serious long term satisfaction and monetary rewards.
Key word: can.
You can also waste your time and end up with something no one will use. In fact, that's the likely outcome — there are many repos on Github with 0 stars, after all. Factorio is designed to reward you for your efforts. The real world has no such guarantees.
Programming can still beat most games in terms of joy. I just miss that burst of satisfaction from completing something in programming because it’s never really done just good enough for production.
Factorio and other open ended optimization games scratch the same itch as programming without any payoff. Speed running feels different because execution is so important optimal changes over time, and you get a finite endpoint.
You're discounting what's actually being said here, and said by many people.
I don't play Factorio for the same basic reason as so many others in this thread: it's too much like programming, and I want to use that energy actually programming. Something I enjoy very much, something which has paid every expense I've had for the last fifteen years, and something which directly produces value for other people.
I also pick up a little handheld most evenings and play games on it. Lately, Puzzle Bobble and Galaxian. Scratches a different itch.
The dichotomy between 'play Factorio' and 'program computer' does not reduce to the dichotomy between 'have fun' and 'joylessly pursue productive endeavors'. Clearly for some people Factorio doesn't produce the former dichotomy in the first place, and more power to 'em. For others it does, and the conclusion that this means we don't like fun is simply invalid.
If this is coming from the feeling that you’re not useful in the meantime - pretty curse that has positive effect on your pro life as a benefit. Makes me miserable though.
In the meantime I always could choose between similar joys based on future professional benefits like programming vs gaming. Factorio is like programming so for me I play it whenever I can with my friends (aka almost never), but otherwise I am programming
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Agreed. Factorio is a fantastic game and it ran so Satisfactory can fly. With every update (and with release) Satisfactory keeps upping the complexity. I would be extremely happy if Factorios development helped push Satisfactory in this way and led to more maps (planets!)
Concur on all points honestly. I will also add that Factorio's setting is pretty bleak, and the game is a bit too addictive to me. It's also harder to just botch things which, because I am trying to have fun and not work, is pretty laborious. In satisfactory if I messed up some spacing of belts or machines or whatever, I can just clip it, go up and over, just generally make a visual mess that works.
Not entirely sure why Factorio is more addictive. Shorter action loops, but often queing and waiting for things to happen might jiggle the brain in a more addictive way. It's not a positive feeling situation either, more like you get trapped having to do more stuff over and over again.
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.
Looks like you tried the game a long time ago. There is totally a way to automate building with the Blueprint Designer which basically allows you save blueprints of full buildings (or building parts or whatever you want) and to build them in one click.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.