The Antagonism of Human and Nature in Factorio | Hacker News Reader

The Antagonism of Human and Nature in Factorio

molily.de

58 pointserlend_sh47 comments

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.

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.

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.

You can manage the ecological effects with efficiency modules, I have built small factories like that. But then you trade the time.

> Pollution and alien relations are not something you can control in the game.

You can (besides using the map creation settings). I've build a big factory without suffering attacks. You can control pollution by using solar (exclusively), efficiency modules and strategic building (build near forest, don't destoy them, they absorb pollution). I did give myself a headstart with a big starting area and lots of forest. And since the requirement to farm aliens for resources has been removed a while ago, there is no reason to attack and agitate them, reducing their agressiveness and expansion.

It does make the game harder and more fun in a way.

solar is late game tech, last time I played you couldn't possibly have been 100% eco play-through (feasibly)

Solar is pretty early/mid game. Only red/green science is needed and for construction coper, iron and steel. Of course before you get to solar you need steam first. But with a bigger start area and enough trees, pollution can be managed until you can go solar.

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.

> Also, a game is not a lecture in economy or ecology.

Okay good, because this sentence invalidates pretty much all of the author's criticisms.

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."

Also, I don't think the author played this game where pollution is turned off:

> 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.

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.

"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."

The concepts of Procedural Rhetoric[1] argues against this view of games.

"The term "procedural rhetoric" was developed by Ian Bogost in his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Bogost defines procedural rhetoric as "the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions, rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures" and "the art of using processes persuasively."

...

"Procedural rhetoric also views games as strongly rhetorical--we "read games as deliberate expressions of particular perspectives." The exploration of possibility spaces becomes rhetorical and instructive as soon as games make claims about aspects of human experience, whether they do so intentionally or inadvertently."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric

You can take the same set of rules and reskin it with the opposite narrative. So I disagree. The rules aren't persuading - the narrative is.

In case of factorio the resking could be about evolving an ecosystem of plants, bacteria, fungi and animals that defend against invasions of robotic miners. Instead of pollution the determining factor that causes invasions would be biomarkers in the atmosphere (which alien probes notice and aliens send the robotized fleet).

There are games like "Cards againt Humanity" or "Dungeon Keeper" where if you take the narrative seriously (which you shouldn't) - it's persuading people to kill everybody. But I'm pretty sure nobody went on a rampage because of these games :)

Factorio as it exists now is the result of a series of deliberate choices, and the point about the bugs being there to force you into weapon production is explicitly stated in the gameplay trailer[0].

You can also compare with Minecraft that has some mobs you can domesticate or otherwise just keep at bay with a simple door.

> Also, I don't think the author played this game where pollution is turned off

As I'm sure you can see yourself, Factorio without bugs and pollution is a very different game, a game that you don't play by default.

[0] https://youtu.be/KVvXv1Z6EY8?t=88

Regardless of the intentions of the author, any piece of art can be read by some as a reflection on the real world (perhaps one of the best examples that is not post-modern is the often touted interpretation of The Lord of the Rings as an allegory for WWII, which is very explicitly against Tolkien's wishes and intents).

Especially in a pseudo-naturalistic game, it is interesting to observe which aspects the game chose to model and which aspects it chose not to model, and discuss the implications to the comparison between the game world and the real world. This is as valid for Factorio as it is for Conquistador or Monopoly or Civilization VI. If the reader believes that "important" (to them) aspects were left out, they may legitimately criticize this reading of the game and point out why viewing some aspect as realistic would be wrong, regardless. Of course, it would absolutely NOT be legitimate to automatically extend this criticism to the game itself, or even more so to the author, it is just a criticism of a certain reading of the game.

There are cases when this type of reading can be seen as an explicit intention of the game design, and in those cases it starts to become more acceptable to criticize the author(s) themselves. For example, while pollution was a major problem in early Civ games, it was removed from the newer ones (until the latest expansion for Civ 6). Given the known importance of pollution in recent human history and discourse, and its presence in the other games, this omission can naturally be seen as intentional and can be criticized or praised based on the message it sends. This would not be correct for Factorio.

but often enough the blue curtain is just a blue curtain

That doesn't matter! Art is about what we, the readers, make of it.

no, that's the interpretation of an art piece, art in itself exist as an expression of a singular intent (well, potentially from a collective of authors)

further reflections are independent thoughts which exist because of the interaction with the art piece, but not within the art piece itself.

as such, these are observations of one's self, and not of the art.

My whole point is that this is reductive.

Even if the author meant the blue curtain to only be a blue curtain, that doesn't mean it can't be interesting to imagine some symbolism for it, and discuss the implications of that symbolism, and then criticize this interpretation. As long as we are not ascribing this interpretation to the author, and as long as we are not claiming that it is the ONLY true interpretation, what is the harm in this? Why is it invalid?

I was all set up to hate on this.

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.

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.

It would 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.

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.

Some mods worked to make it worth to manage pollution by cranking the military to 11 so that the conflict couldn't be easily solved by just more military.

Nauvis Day + Rampant, while unfortunately broken code, was a very interesting setup (I think we also did Angel+Bobs with it), which led me to start building complex reprocessing plants so that instead of deep underground release the captured pollution could be used to recreate raw materials - we had a lot of pollution mitigation because otherwise we probably couldn't defend despite seemingly impregnable defenses.

yeah, interesting. I haven't looked at the mods much (still haven't got the perfect factory setup on vanilla yet!).

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.

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).

(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: https://store.steampowered.com/app/382310/Eco/

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.

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.

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. Coincidentally, around that point the game gives you ridiculous firepower and automated weapons so you don't need to deal with the aliens.

> I think this author is simply oblivious to what makes factorio interesting

To me this is a text by someone that treats the game as if the game authors have created factorio by a series of deliberate choices, that is they treat it like a serious creative work.

> Saying there is little strategic value to factorio without the aliens is preposterous

What they actually say is that the wargame against the aliens is very shallow: "this game is a war game, with little strategic value I might add". I don't know from where you get the idea that they talk about the factory building part.

Whether the aliens are for the just parts of the game or not, it is fact that the authors state in the gameplay trailer that the aliens are there to force you into making weapons: https://youtu.be/KVvXv1Z6EY8?t=88 and this is the trailer on their homepage mind you

> To me this is a text by someone that treats the game as if the game authors have created factorio by a series of deliberate choices, that is they treat it like a serious creative work.

I think factorio is utterly genius. As a creative work, it is more sophisticated and interesting than I think any game I've played. I personally appreciate it as a harnessing of emergent behavior, which tends to be my favorite kind of gameplay.

It's just that the aliens are a really small part of that. The aliens have basically no impact on the game after a point not too far into it. Resources consumed by weapon production become negligible compared to other objectives.

> Whether the aliens are for the just parts of the game or not, it is fact that the authors state in the gameplay trailer that the aliens are there to force you into making weapons: https://youtu.be/KVvXv1Z6EY8?t=88 and this is the trailer on their homepage mind you

Both things can be true at the same time. Yes, the aliens force you to make weapons.

But of course they aren't going to just tell you "at first, the game can be a bit slow, so here are some aliens to keep you busy until your factory is more interesting"...

FWIW, the aliens are also there to make land precious, so there is a more meaningful tradeoff between building a tidy, future-proof factory layout, and something that lets you avoid that nest of biters to your east.

Even later in the game, as you build out train lines to expand to the richer ore patches, they push you to develop automatic systems which can resupply your outposts with extra construction robots, repair packs, replacement laser turrets, walls, artillery shells. Without this, your logistics are mostly one-way: everything except, perhaps, electricity, flows from the outpost to the central factory. (You can get away with doing it manually, but as the aliens get larger and more aggressive, particularly with behemoth spitters, it pays to use a train.)

> The fact that the aliens look like insects and live in huge groups suggests they have a eusocial structure, like ants, bees and humans.

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.

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.

But it's generally understood that trees are the real enemy [3].

[0] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-317 [1] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-69 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/curn9m/if_a_game_... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/8ee3d9/trees_are_...

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.

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).

> the implementation has started from the factory, not from the world

This sounds plausible, but I'm not sure if it's entirely true: the factory building is explicitly set in a foreign world and not in our on as any of the many many other factory sims out there.

I think it is more like the authors had the "fight against xenos with factory" idea as a start and then got severely detoured into the factory building after they had the basics of the world done.

I didn't have a feeling that it's set in a foreign world. It looks like some ugly moving things got slapped on the map because in a video game you naturally have to shoot things.

When developers want to pass a message they use catmen from the Avatar movie. Imagine changing alien models to that. There will be another whole layer of questions.

The author believes the game is harmful because it doesn't teach players to think the right things - the things that the author thinks.

Imagine someone wrote a blog about how Space Invaders encouraged militarism and xenophobia. It sounds like a parody, but then so does this blog post.

See Ken Ishii's music video "Space Invaders 2003":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p--dHQIeagE

It's super cute, and also hits like a truck. Detroit techno is a really inspired musical choice for this kind of thing.

I read it as a very cynical message about the inevitable destructiveness and cruelty of human nature.

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.

It should only escalate to fighting after you mowed down protesters with your tank and zapped saboteurs with laser towers.

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.

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).

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).

I think the game is very helpful in teaching people this relationship, and every individual can draw their own conclusions from that.

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; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc

Factorio is incredibly addictive and I've had a lot of fun optimizing my conveyor belts.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

I recall a Mario vs Sonic article where Sonic is described as peaceful and freedomish (Sonic only hits machines to free animals) whereas you could twist Mario's story around from Bowser's POV where he defends against a relentless invader that stomps, fires at, and overall kills everyone in his path.

By that same token, Sonic is destroying Robotnik's personal property wantonly, where Mario is trying to rescued his kidnapped friend.

Sure, if you eliminate parts of the plot, you can twist is around. But if you include the kidnapped princess and trapped animals, it's pretty clear what side each of those characters is on.

> planning, optimising, getting perfect ratios,

At the expense of what? Optimizing for what?

I remember watching an episode of NatGeo's "Megafactories" showing a Coca-cola plant that could run a massive operation with only 17 employees. Everything beautifully orchestrated, everything so optimized. Yet, hardly what someone would say "the best allocation of time and resources that need optimizing".

Is society better off because this plant managed to reduce its unit production cost by 0.05%, or have we just ensured that we can keep getting cheap unhealthy sugared-water for a little while longer? Was any person that lost that job due to the automation now going to take the time to improve/acquire their professional skills and go on to work on better jobs, or did we just send someone to either welfare or some crappy gig-economy job?

If it was "just a game", sure, go ahead and enjoy it. But I would bet that a lot of people playing the game take some of its lessons and strategies as a model of how to behave at work in real life. And in real life engineers and executives should be able to ask themselves "Why am I optimizing this?", "Why do we need a perfect ratio?" and have answers that go beyond "it looks good on a spreadsheet"

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 good idea. 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.

It was only a matter of time before Factorio got cancelled.

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