Case Study: Why you should play Factorio
deprocrastination.co
deprocrastination.co
Having said that, Factorio is the bomb. I like the point this essayist makes about closed vs. open-ended problem-solving. There's also the matter of building something for now vs. building something for later. Probably the biggest mistake I see in shops are people building for the endgame when they don't even have a basic and simple value loop set up. Factorio teaches this by direct practice and interaction. Because solving coding problems can take a long time, many times programmers can go an entire career without actually learning how to solve problems, instead just learning more and more about how to add solution details.
For some, if they're not going to learn good architecture evolution here they'll never grok it.
Recommended. But beware: it's a freaking huge time sink. I had to take it off all but one of my PCs.
To quote a buddy of mine, after I jumped on Discord to play some other game with him, as I woke him out of his Factorio slumber: "Help, get me out of here. I don't remember building all this, nor when I last went to bed."
He's no longer allowed to play Factorio.
When another buddy recently bought it on sale and we told him this same story, he simply laughed it off. The last we've heard of him since was a few weeks back on Discord, simply stating "my god".
I didn't even enjoy[0] Factorio and it still ate just over 60 hours of my time, so please heed this warning everyone. Factorio is Nerd-Sniping: The Game.
[0] I would like to take a moment to say that while I personally have a distaste for the kind of experience Factorio is, it is an incredibly well made version of what it is. I discovered only one bug[1] during my playthrough and the simulation can handle millions of interacting objects in a vast play area in real time to an impressive degree, and I don't consider myself to be easily impressed by the speed of modern software since modern computers are so ludicrously fast.
[1] It is possible to drop the deconstruction planner into the world as an object an infinite number of times even before it unlocks.
This was the most stressful game I ever played. First, because there's always something to do, that needs your attention. Second, because it was so addictive that even my work suffered. The rocket was the probably the least satisfying ending to a game, but I have never been so relieved to finish a game.
[0] Which I caught at work along with pretty much everyone in the office because the person running the company decided they absolutely needed all of us back there after about a month of most people working from home (but not me!). To be fair, the people working the plant did legitimately have to be onsite, and they also all caught it. 2020 was our best sales year to date, and no one died, so I'm sure there were no lessons learned. Yes, I am bitter about this.
> "If you’re in a slump (rut), chances are you feel like you can’t complete anything. You feel like you’re unable to finish anything so what’s the point of starting. Factorio is a great cure against that. Especially when you view it as a challenge."
"Why you should play Factorio" ; you absolutely can, it might have more benefits for you than other games, but besides that I really have trouble with such a headline, especially since the URL is called "deprocastination" (the home page sells an e-book, which promises to solve your problems and you can sign up via e-mail, not confidence inspiring). If you want to stop procrastinating, you probably should just delete Steam and get on with your tasks?
I'm not saying it's easy. There are things that can help: Meditation, proper task scheduling, talking to people about your problems, stress management techniques, in extreme cases therapy ...
"Play Factorio!" - Great advice /s
> "You can start taking the skills you learned and use them for anything else that is productive."
FAANG should look for new employees on World of Warcraft servers... /s
There is no technological cure to a spiritual problem. This is selling snake oil.
Edit1: interesting to see the up-/ and downvotes on this. I am not dissing gaming, not dissing the game. But recommending a computer game as a means to deal with procrastination and develop "real life skills you can use being productive" (paraphrased), that notion I do indeed find ludicrous and stand by it.
Edit2: From an answer I gave to a comment below (sorry for the edit, but I think I worded it in a nice way there):
The implication, that "procrastination" means "no due diligence" in anything is _WRONG_. It's due diligence in things that should take no priority as the very means to avoid the things you should be doing instead!
"Play Factorio, it has benefits for you that help you be productive" in response to someone dealing with procrastination? If that isn't absurd, I don't know what is.
Procrastination is serious problem and anything that helps someone deal with it should not be dismissed.
Edit:
Procrastination is all about avoiding a problem (could be work, could be phone call, anything really) by looking for excuses/reasons why it cannot be done or why it must be postponed before something else is done first.
In Factorio, if you don't have enough let's say steel plates, you _HAVE_ to go and increase your ore production. No excuses will help you avoid the issue and if you get used to it, it can help you get this attitude outside the game and apply what you've learned in real life.
Edit2: (I can bypass the time lock this way? interesting)
Considering I'm nice person as well, I'm just going to say that it's probably more useful for people actually having the problem than meditation and similar new age nonsense.
Doing anything right when it needs to be done can be a huge step forward from the horrible swamp that is procrastination.
You don't typically deal with something by making it worse, in this case spending more time not doing work...
The implication, that "procrastination" means "no due diligence" in anything is _WRONG_. It's due diligence in things that should take no priority as the very means to avoid the things you should be doing instead!
"Play Factorio, it has benefits for you that help you be productive" in response to someone dealing with procrastination? If that isn't absurd, I don't know what is.
I've been this person - I spent almost two years playing Everquest to the detriment of my own goals and wellbeing.
MMOs are a special class of hazard in that area, IMO. I feel like I'm particularly apt to getting "sucked into" games, there is always a point where it becomes significantly less fun and I lose interest. In most games that's around 20-50 hours. For "good" games, it's around 200 hours. For MMOs... I don't know because I've never found it. With EQ I only stopped playing because my PC finally died and I couldn't afford to replace it (because I couldn't hold down a job). With others I stopped because I saw the feedback loop had begun that would lead to that sort of issue and forced myself to do so.
> "Play Factorio, it has benefits for you that help you be productive" in response to someone dealing with procrastination? If that isn't absurd, I don't know what is.
I totally understand and respect your point here, but I didn't come to the article through the series. As a result, I didn't make any connections to trying to see Factorio as a tool to combat procrastination.
Instead, I saw the article as advocating Factorio as a means of developing your problem-solving skills. For that purpose... honestly, it's pretty good. The article makes a good case for this and my own experience aligns with it.
I would have no issues encouraging my daughters to play Factorio (or similar games like Satisfactory), because I believe there are important skills that can be learned there. Like most things, the Pareto Principle applies: you're going to learn a lot more on your first playthrough than your forty-second. Even so... as a software engineer, I see many parallels in building and maintaining complex systems in the real world that can be drawn from the game.
For example - and I'm playing Satisfactory these days, so the items come from that, not Factorio - in the early game you need a ton of iron plates and iron rods. Mid-game you need reinforced iron plates, screws, and modular frames, all of which are made from iron plates and iron rods. Even though you know you'll shortly need several multiples of the number of iron plates and rods that you need in the beginning, it doesn't make sense to build a massive factory to create them in bulk yet. Doing so means that it takes you longer to get through the early game, and invariably your needs change as you progress: maybe you need fewer iron plates and rods than you thought; maybe you need more; maybe you need them halfway across the map. You just don't know enough in the early game to accurately predict what you're going to need and where.
This has strong corollaries with software engineering, both within a single application and when building more complex systems. It's almost always better to build the minimal structures necessary to deliver what you need at the time. There are a few cases where it makes sense to optimize early, but those cases all require experience in building the thing you're working on and the burden of early optimization is much more difficult to justify than it may seem.
No you don't. Unless you have literally zero supply. You can always settle for "good enough" and live on less than perfect supply of any resource.
Having played Factorio, I partly share your sentiment. All in, it's just a creative game that can teach you forward thinking in a way different than, say, chess. And you can spend your time in a way that gives you more satisfaction and benefit.
However, there are some aspects of Factiorio that make it stand out. I'd say that it is unique in the sense of teaching how to scale whatever you do taking into account limited resources. The particular skills learned might not be easily transferable to the other areas of your life, but the general principles (of assessment, planning, paying attention to what you have and what you can have, the importance of quick adjustments to changing circumstances) are.
Keep in mind that this is the last post of a series specifically geared towards helping people stop gaming.
> If you want to stop procrastinating, you probably should just delete Steam and get on with your tasks? > I'm not saying it's easy. There are things that can help: Meditation, proper task scheduling, talking to people about your problems, stress management techniques, in extreme cases therapy ...
Naturally, our articles cover the above, as does the book (that you casually dismissed)
And to your last point, technological cures (like the extension on our site) and specific techniques are often the start of the journey. For many people they are more approachable than the "spiritual" approach.
What? This post was about why you should play a video game. A game that many people here say is incredibly addicting. How does that possibly help people stop gaming?
I agree that things like WoW and Factorio are not going to help you avoid procrastination. However, they are not, themselves, procrastination any more than working on your own project is, or getting together with friends. WoW has a strong component of problem solving and working together with friends. Factorio is almost all about problem solving. Taking the time away from "responsibilities" to let your mind do other things is also very good for you (see also, meditation).
Taking time to "play" is an important path of a healthy life , and Video Games are almost a canonical example of doing that.
Computer games are fine. I'm not playing these days, but I've played my fair share (by which I mean _a lot_). It's a perfectly valid use of one's time (not that I try to judge in any way, shape or form), but not as a supposed "virtue" for an individual that is struggling with procrastination.
If you are someone with a day job, active social life, and spend time playing computer games, there are certain games that will give you value, ideas, fun, intellectual stimulation. I'm not arguing against gaming, and for reading. Neither is a "fix" for procrastination. "Start reading a chapter a day in a book to fix procrastination", calling that nonsense is not arguing against the virtues of reading.
If you are someone procrastinating, not doing important tasks and not fulfilling your responsibilities, saying "play this game", as it will teach you to "overcome procrastination" and "how to be productive in real life", all of which is either directly stated or at least strongly implied in the article, then I strongly disagree, and even go so far as to consider the advise dangerous, and laughable.
For someone suffering from severe procrastination, to the point at where it has a strong negative impact on one's life, I think stress management, introspection, reaching out to people, meditation, forming healthy habits, in some cases even therapy, all of that is far better advise than "Play Factorio".
Now we all need to switch off sometimes, but games require a real commitment, whilst other activities such as watching TV, I can walk away and come back months or years later to carry on with a series.
Or do exercise - which has real benefits in a short period of time.
In my 20s I spent several hours each day playing games. Time I'll never get back and I have nothing to show for it :(
(0) https://www.clozemaster.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-le...
It's not an avarage but in a burst
There is always something small you meant to do, one more improvements that will take only a min... suddenly you hear birds singing outside... its 4am...
Never again.
Because of the sleep deprivation I felt the day after, I decided it was cocaine and dumped it.
"Factorio is a great cure" my butt.
> sleep deprivation I felt the day after
Yep. I've had a more than my share of "five minute" gaming sessions like that :)
So your comment alone would tell me all I need to know about the nature of the pull of this game.
> NATURE OF THE GAME > Especially we are not responsible if you stay awake all night long playing Factorio and can't go to school / work in the morning :)
They warn you ahead of time.
Things that have worked for me:
1. Spending 30 minutes most days on whatever my oldest tasks are, regardless of how important. I just go with the oldest first.
2. Meeting a project manager for 30 minutes each week to talk about what's going on in my life. [0]
3. Quitting video games. (Civ 5, really).
4. In the morning, I throw on some clothes, go for a five minute walk, and then work for 2 hours on my core work (for me, coding).
[0] If you hire a life coach to do this in the US to do this in the US it's very pricey. And I tend to dislike the type of person who wants to be a life coach. A PM in Latin America is much cheaper.
I've spoken to many counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists about this, and while some have been supportive of my approach none have seemed to really understand the importance of exploiting my "natural" focus over overriding it via willpower. Of all places, I recently found that a lot of people on TikTok with self-professed ADHD describe very similar challenges and coping mechanisms.
In short, ADHD seems to not be a deficiency in the ability to focus. Indeed, it comes with the ability and tendency to engage in extreme focus for long periods. The problem is that I don't get to consciously choose the target of that focus, and that it's extremely difficult to break it once I'm focused on the wrong thing.
I've found that there really aren't any replacement hobbies for gaming as such. Lots of things to do instead, but nothing really replaces it. Personally, the closest thing I came to the same kind of enjoyment I got out of gaming is meeting other people IRL and being social.
Games for me was able to fill a very odd spot in my mind I think, they were challenging to the extent that you felt like you were growing a skill, and at the same time rewarding with various power-trip-gimmicks like "winning" or just plain old fun things like explosions, guns and (fantasy)-violence, stuff that gets your lizard brain going you know. It boiled down to "fun-work", and by that I mean truly fun work, stuff that you completely voluntarily do and which is void of the added boring fluff that comes with normal work. And as said, also something to grow into where a skill is actually being developed and a kind of deeper gratification can be found by continuous progress. (All the previously mentioned aspects were however too fake for me in the end, the lizard brain part doesnt understand that it was fake skills and fake victories though, so it liked them all the same)
On the topic of Factorio: I am absolutely certain this game would suck me in for far too many hours. I've heard stories about it and I can imagine how neat the problem-solving to feedback loops are, combined with creativity and you know, explosions.
However, if you have employees that are struggling with exactly solving open ended problems, games like this one probably does train that brain function.
Like movies and books, these games have a beginning and an end and a set duration between the two. Examples include Portal (1&2), Gris, Sayonara Wild Hearts, and Journey.
The problem is that I’m rarely playing just for the story and I end up feeling like I’m constantly managing the difficulty level. I want the game to lead me on a journey, with the right amount of challenge predetermined for me.
I played a lot of Minecraft(though I stopped 2 years ago) , exploring and mining in that game while listening to a audio book is so relaxing, it does not feel as a grind and if you want to build or decorate you pop into creative and do it.
But some frustrating stuff are quests that lock you out from the main story, like in GTA4 was a quest where you had to be super fast on a bike and I was terrible at it, so you have to repeat same shit over and over again or give up (later in GTA V , they let you skip sections if you fail 3 times)
Not all games are equal though, some of them respect this and force us into sessions or have a journey with a beginning and an ending.
In any case, I decided to never pay big games 2 times and the second time sticked. The crawings went down over time, I rarely feel it anymore. And offer time I got used to hobbies that don't cause those emotional ups and downs, I don't expect them anymore, so they don't bore me anymore.
But after a year, you look back and you see massive progress. You see yourself doing things you thought are impossible for you a year ago. And all that while you are fully aware you still wasted ton of time by doing nothing. It is not like I would be overworked from useful learning. It just happened, piece by piece.
I allow myself free games on cell phone once in a while. But the decision to never pay naturally means I will either reach the end soon or get bored with it.
I avoid online multiplayer and competitive gaming. I stick to single player games I can "finish". It's a great way to get that fix and have a great sense of accomplishment without gaming overtaking your life. I've finished more humongous games this way than I ever did and I've been a serious gamer my entire life (cutting out multiplayer definitely, no doubt).
That goes out the window this year on 5/15 when the new Subnautica is released though.
I also enjoy playing old games though, so in order to silence that voice I stream those sessions, which somehow allows me to feel like it is a productive use of my time even though I have never made any money from it and among the least popular regular streamers in an already low-popularity category.
For me, I see games as a very simple effort/reward process. I can put in some time solving a problem and I get a dopamine hit. It's like junk food for my brain's reward centers :)
The "odd spot in your mind" that you mention, for me, is that cycle: solve a small problem, receive dopamine hit, move on to the next problem. Gaming makes that reward cycle very fast. That makes it efficient, but it also seems to acclimate me to a cycle speed that isn't common in real life.
I find that some hobbies are an acceptable substitute, at least for a while. Most of those involve physical skills that need to be built over time. Some hobbies that I've tried that fill the same mental niche for me include:
* repairing and restoring vintage fountain pens
* metalworking/machining
* building and flying (but mostly building) FPV drones
* shooting sports (always expensive, but much more so right now)
* mechanical watch repair/"modding"
* playing a musical instrument (ukulele is inexpensive and fun)
* photography
* 3D printing - both optimizing the printers themselves and designing solutions in CAD
* backpressure: your belts fill up
* optimization problems: there's always at least one bottleneck, it just shifts elsewhere
* deadlocks: a circular universal/sushi belt will block if not properly managed
* parallelism: extending a branch off your main bus
* locks: chained signals for shared train sections
And then, you have combinators
This is a very good point, and one that I hadn't considered.
I'm playing Satisfactory at the moment (very similar game) and for the first few dozen hours I played it I used building efficiency as my metric.
For instance, let's say I have a simple factory chain: miner (iron ore), smelter (iron ingots), constructor (iron plates). I would start at the output side and make sure each building was operating at 100% efficiency. This works fine on a small scale and can produce optimal results in the early game.
Later, I noticed that my conveyors moved at a set pace, and that I could easily find bottlenecks in my design by observing where the conveyors were either only partially filled or were stopping as inputs exceeded needs. As you progress, your factories get much larger. Checking each building takes time, and changes to the system mean you have to check each building after the changes propagate to be sure you've not messed something else up. It turns out that once you've reached a certain point of complexity, your bottleneck is more often input, not efficiency. Watching your conveyors gives you much faster feedback, and you can tell at a glance if you need to increase resource input into a factory "module" or if you need to modify your design at some point within than module.
This is mirrored very well in managing a team of software engineers: you can watch individual productivity metrics, hours spent working on problems, story points delivered, etc. - but at some point, watching the inputs become a more comprehensive metric. Instead of exclusively monitoring your team's velocity (output), you should watch the size of your backlog over time (input). By extension, that means you should ensure that sufficient time is spent grooming and prioritizing backlog issues to ensure that you don't have things in your work queue that are no longer valid tasks (make sure you're not moving things that don't need to be moved anymore).
If your backlog is steadily growing, it's time to talk about increasing your team's capacity. Often that means hiring more people (adding more buildings), which is the most direct solution. If payroll costs (power generation) are your containing factor, though, then your effort should be focused on tracking and optimizing individual and subteam productivity (individual building efficiency).
Everyone says the game is addicting, but I merely find it simply "fun." Maybe the current quality of video games is so poor that anything that actually engages you for a few hours is declared addicting, but I find that a sad state of affairs. Then again, the norm for major publishers seems to be hype up a game, then sell an incomplete piece of software to kids who don't know any better. Providing demos of software is passé.
If people aren't designing video games that I can actually be engaged with for a few hours at a time, what's the point? Do not Monopoly players who actually enjoy the game, poker players, or chess players do the same?
Why do we not call Minecraft, "Crackcraft?" It's almost certainly played more, and plays basically identically in sandbox nature to me as Factorio: you build things, and you enjoy doing it.
I quite like the supply challenges but find in comparison to the Zachtronics Industries games (e.g. Space Chem) that not seeing competitive stats and being able to tinker/optimize is a missed opportunity.
I’m sure I’ll give factorio another go at some point, but its got a somewhat steep learning curve and it’s just too micro heavy for my taste. (Also there are likely mods to fix all of my minor complaints anyway).
Somewhat related - Rimworld. Best Dwarf Fortess style game with a GUI and more mods than I could play in a lifetime. Also, muchhhh less micro management (most of the time - combat can require a lot of attention).
After hearing of factorio for the first time a few weeks ago (recall the article and n using factorio in hiring?), I was intrigued. I’m on the last level of the tutorial. I can see why people could like it. It is too much like work to me. I already practice the art of “breaking it down” — that is the core skill I learned as a math student and later as a math teacher and has been reinforced daily as a developer. Pretty sure it was one of tue first lessons in my first CS classes. This game will not teach me that, and I’m surprised that it would teach any software developer more about breaking it down. To me, the game is a time sink at that is pretty much it. And for me, just not captivating enough.
If you ever get stuck or you're bored, open the repl and just learn something that you didn't already know. Then write it down somewhere, on real paper, and keep it.
I'm not ashamed to say I still do this. I've got probably 3 dozen pages in an old composition book of little perl/bash/python/jq tidbits. It's amazing how much detail is in the little tools we use everyday.
Factorio is cool, but it's just not very productive. There's that translation layer between the game and real code for real life.
I'm glad I own all the ones you mentioned, and maybe I'll revisit them in the future, but I didn't find them fulfilling in the same way Factorio and DSP are
I am frustrated by DSPs current lack of support for blueprints (especially since the game starts you off with the automation droids that you have to earn in Factorio) but overall I think DSP is more fun as a game
I'm glad I have both to choose whether I feel like shooting something, but for me the "pure" DSP is more relaxing
But how do you get out of a slump you're in caused by playing Factorio? Especially if you're still trying to get rid of the spoon?