I think the developers are really smart about those design choices. Pollution and alien relations are not something you can control in the game. They are just an effect of playing the game. You are focused of producing more stuff in order to unlock tools to allow you to produce even more stuff.<p>If you could somehow manage the pollution levels, the ecological message would be weaker. It would mean that you can still increase your production as much as you like and still keep the planet peaceful and green. In factorio the only way to keep a peaceful environment is not to play. If you want to launch a rocket, you will need to destroy forest and alien nests.<p>The game commentary about pollution & colonialism is stronger because those elements are inevitable. Want to expand to get this new iron mine? First equip a flamethrower and burn down the area.
This is reading way too much into the game. The game is not a didactic device that aims to teach a lesson about ecology, conservation, and the peaceful coexistence with nature, just like plenty of works of fiction do not address anything in the real world—they are simply figments of the author's imagination.<p>> Also, a game is not a lecture in economy or ecology.<p>Okay good, because this sentence invalidates pretty much all of the author's criticisms.<p>I feel that the whole article is just like the people who say shooting games are harmful because they promote violence in real life (they don't). Why not write about them? "Shooting games actively ignore the basics of human-human interaction, and ultimately the basics of life."<p>Also, I don't think the author played this game where pollution is turned off:<p>> As a game device, the aliens force the player to build a machinery of war. If one would take out the products, the buildings, the technology research etc. directly or indirectly connected to military, there is only a fraction left. So for a great deal, this game is a war game, with little strategic value I might add.<p>When you turn off pollution, you turn off the militaristic aspects of the game, and I can assure you there are plenty of interesting things to explore without the military. From basics like fully utilizing the two-sided nature of conveyor belts (you can totally have each half delivering completely different products and prevent them from mixing up, therefore saving space), to intermediate stuff like fluid mechanics (how many pumps and where), train station design (how to load and unload efficiently) and railroad planning (train signals are surprisingly rich), to advanced things like circuit networks and combinators.
I was all set up to hate on this.<p>The remark about "If one would take out the products, the buildings, the technology research etc. directly or indirectly connected to military, there is only a fraction left." particularly struck me as untrue - yes there are some technologies that are military, but the vast majority are not. I have played several games with no pollution and no aliens, and if you remove those then there is a significant game left. This game is not "about" killing bugs.<p>But, I also get the comment about interacting with the bugs. They do feel like cardboard-cutout characters left over from the first implementation and not touched since. They don't seem to interact with the world, and they do feel like a missed opportunity.<p>It <i>would</i> be cool to be able to trade with the bugs instead of destroying their nests to get materials. Having to manage pollution because it affected trade, etc.<p>I do feel bad when my filth-belching factory causes the bugs to attack me, and my only response is to destroy them. Hence playing games with this turned off. It would be great if there was an option to include them without inevitably getting into conflict with them.
I am deeply concerned about human impact on our planet, but I actually liked that aspect of the game. We have games to provide escape, so it's not morally wrong to play a villain in a game (I guess in Westworld it gets blurry, but we don't have that technology yet), as long as you recognize that the game is not the real world.<p>That being said, I would love to see a (kind of educational) game somewhat similar to Factorio, or Civilization, that would realistically show the proper impact and scale of industry and agriculture to our planet and ecosystems (and also properly account for laws of conservation of mass and energy). It would probably be on a bigger scale than Factorio, with map squares larger than 1 km^2. I was fascinated by the montage in Michael Moore's Planet of the Humans, which showed how many different resources and industries are required to create solar panels (or anything really).<p>(I suspect in some sense, it would have to be a "hyperproject" - like Wikipedia or OpenStreetmaps, something that cannot be expected to be completed by a single organization.)
As another comment pointed out, the game Eco has a very similar premise to Factorio (accelerating technology to achieve an important goal) but includes a complex environmental simulation that encourages players to work together. Worth checking out for those who got hooked on Factorio. Here's a link: <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/382310/Eco/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/382310/Eco/</a>
> As a game device, the aliens force the player to build a machinery of war. If one would take out the products, the buildings, the technology research etc. directly or indirectly connected to military, there is only a fraction left. So for a great deal, this game is a war game, with little strategic value I might add.<p>I think this author is simply oblivious to what makes factorio interesting. I'm pretty sure I've played hundreds of hours of factorio, the proportion of that time spent dealing with the aliens was negligible.<p>Saying there is little strategic value to factorio without the aliens is preposterous. Toward the end of my factorio playing I simply turned them off all together because it was just a mild annoyance to have to deal with the aliens.<p>I think the real purpose of the aliens in the game is much simpler: the early-mid game in factorio can be kind of boring, because your factory won't be consuming all of your time. The developers needed something to make this part of the game more entertaining, and so the aliens provide something to do during this phase of the game. In the late game, there's no need for a distraction, your factory will be providing plenty to do by itself. <i>Coincidentally</i>, around that point the game gives you ridiculous firepower and automated weapons so you don't need to deal with the aliens.
> The fact that the aliens look like insects and live in huge groups suggests they have a eusocial structure, like ants, bees and humans.<p>The aliens have a pathfinding algorith [0] and a function to calculate aggression and evolution as product of polution over time. They are just as much a social society as mold on the ingredients of a cooking simulation game or algea in your Sims swimming pool.<p>That said, the creators are aware of the narative the game portraits [1]. I just think they want to focus more on the complexity of factories to provide the player with a challenge requiring a spreadsheet just start the lategame [2] and the aliens are just a vehicle for statistics in that case.<p>But it's generally understood that trees are the real enemy [3].<p>[0] <a href="https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-317" rel="nofollow">https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-317</a>
[1] <a href="https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-69" rel="nofollow">https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-69</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/curn9m/if_a_game_doesnt_need_a_spreadsheet_to_solve_it/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/curn9m/if_a_game_...</a>
[3] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/8ee3d9/trees_are_the_real_enemy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/8ee3d9/trees_are_...</a>
The gameplay is building a factory. An example of a more sophisticated interaction with the in-game "nature" is Minecraft: there the living things just become a part of your factory.<p>The simulation in Factorio isn't "harmful", it's just incomplete (in a way the author of the post doesn't like) because the implementation has started from the factory, not from the world (like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress did).
I would also like the aliens to be depicted as more peaceful. Would be nice if they just started with protesting in front of your factories with a little act of sabotage here and there.<p>It should only escalate to fighting after you mowed down protesters with your tank and zapped saboteurs with laser towers.<p>Wouldn't mind a diplomatic expansion where you can trade democracy for oil and help aliens get rid of terrorist cells and their backward religious believes.
I'm not going to dismiss the author's comments on the game but I do feel it's reading a lot into what is just a game. A game that I've sunk almost 2000 hours into and have only played with enemies/pollution on for <30hrs. They weren't fun mechanics since, as the author points out, there are no options but to fight and pollute. I've even tried to play with mods that let you clean the air but they don't work well even once I've gone full-solar. I'm willing to have my beliefs challenged but I'm not grasping how this game is inherently bad or promoting bad/harmful ideas. I don't find the pollution or alien aspects of the game well thought out but thankfully I can turn them off and just play a factory-builder game.<p>As for the opening quote. I've seen the YT video of these comments being made and I'm struggling to understand the line being drawn between a person with a disability and AI/ML models trying to move. I'm not saying it's wrong but I just don't understand. If someone can summarize it better I would really like to better grasp what Hayao Miyazaki means by this.
I agree with the observations that you are pitted against nature in factorio, have to kill the bugs and claim territory from them. I've made those observations myself. I disagree on the conclusion though (seems to be a half sentence at the end that they indicate it's harmful).<p>This concept makes the game more truthful about what's actually happening here on earth. Because this is what we currently do. We are an extinction event for a large number of species (except for the subset of hemerophiles), and have been for large parts of our existence (why did the megafauna suddenly disappear? because we LOVED to hunt them).<p>I think the game is very helpful in teaching people this relationship, and every individual can draw their own conclusions from that.<p>Also, the main story of the game is actually good for nature in the long term. The TLDR is that you are stranded on the planet and want to build a rocket so that you can leave it and get home. If you believe that humans are a threat to nature, there is no better solution for it than us leaving earth and turning it into a national park, like Bezos suggests. If we build our rockets one day, we can leave earth behind and let nature recover.
The opening quote is in reference to this; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc</a>
Factorio is incredibly addictive and I've had a lot of fun optimizing my conveyor belts.<p>Whether it's intentional or not, the game really does show how convenient it is to depend on fossil fuels, pave over forests, and just kill all life standing in the way of unustainable expansion.<p>The ultimate end of the game is factory engulfing the whole planet, using up all natural resources, and making the planet a graveyard of steel and concrete.
The beautiful contradiction of this article is that it's a Marxist critique of a game which represents a reality which is congruent with Marxist critiques of our own. The issue is not that the game doesn't provide an opportunity for paradise but instead that the player inhabits the role of evil without an opportunity for reflection. Games can do this. Brenda Romero's Train is a well-known example where the player is unknowingly complicit in evil until the reveal. While I'm not a fan of the increasing politicisation of games, it seems to me that gamer's insistence of total amorality in gameplay is a barrier to games becoming a serious art-form.
it's an interesting take of the state of aliens as they exist in game today, but there's also a very down to earth reason as to why alien feel an afterthought: 2012-2013 had a huge surge in tower defense genre popularity, while logistic optimization games were relatively niche.
Another example of mild outrage culture.<p>I wonder if the author would blame Robinson Crusoe for thoughtless capturing of goats and interfering with the locals.
Well, that was a waste of time reading...<p>I have spent nearly 1000 hours in Factorio and to me this game was about planning, optimising, getting perfect ratios, then you hit hardware limitations and start experimenting on how to get things more optimised.<p>So yeah, you take from the game what you want to take, if you will try hard enought you can make Tetris look like an evil game about destroying bricks...
The author might be interested in trying out Eco. It plays like a mix of Minecraft and Factorio, but with ecology and economy added in - you need food and other resources from nature, which you can preserve or cultivate, and pollution causes natural resources to dwindle. There's less automation than Factorio - instead the game is intended to be played by a community of players working together (in a more or less capitalist way depending on what you're into).
The game is, just as the author says, basically a model of our own capitalist system. Or maybe a model of the conquest and exploitation of the new world. It features conquest, growth, exponential expansion, -and resource depletion. I’m not sure that makes it bad though, from the sounds of it the game creators were quite conscious of what they were doing- in fact they may have been subtly making the same sorts of points as the author of the article. After all the game of universal paperclips is not supposed to leave you with the impression that converting the whole universe into paperclips was a <i>good idea</i>. Exponential expansion is fun and feels like winning, even though from the point of view of the people on the receiving end of historical examples of such projects, it was no doubt no fun at all.