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Your post comes across as extremely condescending and, honestly, misinformed. You clearly believe that playing video games is a complete waste of time; whereas things like meditation and working on your own project are not. And then you try to layer on things like eating healthy, sleeping, and working out; which are good things in their own right, but serve different purposes that playing a video game does.

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.

I tried to make a point, you might call it condescending, I think it's poignant. But I see what you mean. And that probably explains some people's misgivings with my comment.

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".

At nearly 40 I really struggle to justify the time to play games. The really good games, the kind that offer amazing experiences, require so many hours to get to that point that you start to compare it against other activities that are far more fulfilling. Looking at some people's Steam play times, they are in the 100's of hours on a single game, which is the time needed to, for example learn a new language. (0)

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...

You have a couple points there. I might change the headline.

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.

> Keep in mind that this is the last post of a series specifically geared towards helping people stop gaming.

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?

The series is about gaming addiction. After writing about it extensively, we found only 1-5 % of gamers get addicted to gaming, so we don't have to demonize it (GAMES =/= BAD). Therefore, I would argue that if someone CAN MODERATE, it's a really good way to spend some of your free time. Additionally, Factorio can have transferable benefits into your professional life.

OT: but back when Stripe did the CTF challenges, I wondered if they used it as a recruiting platform. They had both a measure of technical ability and there was also a discussion forum that almost certainly illuminated good communicators who conducted themselves well.

(I consider upvoting or downvoting such comments a stupid game, especially as far as opinions are concerned - if the number of people shouting "I disagree" is larger than "I agree", you'll just get greyed out.)

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.

Sorry, but your reply sounds like "just stop being poor".

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.

>Procrastination is serious problem and anything that helps someone deal with it should not be dismissed.

You don't typically deal with something by making it worse, in this case spending more time not doing work...

I'm pretty sure plenty of people addicted to MMORPGs don't forget leveling up their character, and going to the "ruins at 7 pm with their teamspeak party to raid for magic staff wand XYZ" ; to peddle the tool they use to procrastinate as a _cure_, because at least you're doing something diligently? Sorry, I am a nice person, but I am able to have strong opinions: This is nonsense.

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'm pretty sure plenty of people addicted to MMORPGs don't forget leveling up their character

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.

>In Factorio, if you don't have enough let's say steel plates, you _HAVE_ to go and increase your ore production.

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.

Except OP was explaining how it doesn't solve procrastination, at all. Procrastination problems don't get solved by having a new method of procrastination. That's like trying to combat crack addiction by switching to heroin. Nothing in their comment seemed like, "just stop being poor".