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Comment by impalallama | Hacker News Reader

> I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year.... But since trying it out a bit more I’m starting to suspect that Factorio is the rare computer game to actually increase GDP.

Hell of an opener that just makes me immediately dislike this guys entire worldview.

Kinda also backed up by the fact that he doesn't mention the very unsubtle commentary of you basically strip mining an alien planet clean mutating the wild life into a homicidal frenzy in desperate attempt to stop you from killing their home with pollution.

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> he doesn't mention the very unsubtle commentary of you basically strip mining an alien planet clean mutating the wild life into a homicidal frenzy in desperate attempt to stop you from killing their home with pollution.

People who get hung up on this are pretty shallow though. It’s such a tiring trope of “oh no, look at how bad colonialism is”. There is a lot of good stuff to discuss about the game beyond the sophomoric analogies with the native aliens.

When people are discussing things like call of duty, battlefield, etc it would be equally as idiotic to discuss “the unsubtle commentary of the horrors of war”.

The game allows one to disable the wildlife, no mods required, so it’s possible to focus solely on game without dealing with it at all.

However. I do think it’s a pretty amazing mechanic that the game designers put in the game, and is a great tool to shine light on the darkest aspect of the human race: our unbelievable capacity to subdue and destroy.

Factorio isn’t just about being dropped in a war zone and shooting the bad guys. It’s about scaling up destruction to a planetary scale. Often unintentionally (pollution) but also intentionally (nukes). These are all very rich and interesting things to speculate on, none of it is “shallow”.

What do you mean "speculate"? Seems pretty straightforward: you're polluting and killing the native life. And? Do that in real life = bad. Do that in a game = ok. I think we all know that.

This post is titled "The Factorio Mindset" and the author spends a lot of time talking about why it's something positive that should be cultivated. I'm not so sure we do all know that.

Call of Duty can teach you teamwork without making you think every problem is solved by an AK-47. Kids play Minecraft but don't expect buildings to float in the air.

Humans are reasonably intelligent and context-sensitive. They understand the difference between "video game" and "real life situation"

honestly, I though the pollution and wildlife aggression were put in the game as balancing elements (urge to switch power source, force to invest in defences, slow expansion) rather than any commentary

Some people legitimately think the purpose of life is productivity. I see quite a few on twitter and I can't help but stare and study them like some alien lifeform.

They make for excellent employees. Promotion of this and similar values almost seem like they were designed for capitalists to exploit.

For sure. I'd legitimately love to get inside their heads and see what makes them tick because it's a completely foreign mindset for me.

I saw some recently on twitter who were discussing how they run their relationships like a corporate business... They have standups, 1on1's, scheduled relationship sync up meetings, etc. As if doing this bullshit during their day jobs wasn't enough.

“Don’t trust stuff you read on the internet”.

I would be careful about this stuff as a lot of people are in the “productivity coach” market.

Are you warning me so I don't get sucked into that mindset? If so then you've seriously misunderstood my comments.

I despise productivity hacker, grindset culture.

Purpose of life is reproduction Reproduction is easier in engineered environment

Are you saying you're one of those people? If so could you tell me why you're ok with trivializing your life like that? Are you religious?

You might be using the word "purpose" in different senses. The one you're responding to likely means that "the selection bias inherent in our perspective on the world selects for traits that enhance reproduction".

I've played a game called Prosperous universe and witnessed the end of capitalism. Think about it. A game where the enjoyment is derived from economic activity and it's growth. At some point you reach the end of the tech tree. There are no new frontiers to discover. There is no need for further productivity. The game is prone to making itself redundant. If there was no base limit and bots were accepted the entire game could be played by a single player thereby eliminating the need for all other players.

When you consider this inherent contradiction you really start wondering what the point of capitalism is. You reach the end and stop playing. Why haven't we stopped "playing" the same way I stopped playing?

There is an existential crisis at the core of capitalism. Productivity can only exist for the sake of leisure.

Start a game, do absolutely nothing. Witness aliens killing you nonetheless. Aliens aren't the poor good natives, and it's so easily disproven I don't understand how it ever become to be a thing.

Drop into your local forest, do absolutely nothing. Eventually witness a wild animal kill you. Does that justify ecocide?

Have you played the game? Biters are an infestation, if you do nothing they'll eat up the remaining available surface and destroy the local biomass. The engineer has at least a choice, and it's goal isn't infinite consumption.

Sure locally a bear can get me in a forest, but I don't need ecocide to survive a bear, and neither the engineer has to to survive biters.

I did play the game, way too much actually.

The biters don't actually destroy the biomass. Canonically, in the game, they've been there forever : https://wiki.factorio.com/Enemies , so their expansion is only triggered by the arrival of the engineer.

They also consume pollution, making them symbiotic with the local biomass.

In most of these colonization/industrialization games, the entire point is the thrill of taming a wild land and producing grand feats of engineering out of nothing. The survivalist framing, with mindlessly hostile natives, is just a narrative convenience to brush aside the ethical implications of invasion.

I don't think a video game necessarily needs to brush aside ethics: it's a game, you're allowed to be unethical.

Might be overthinking it a bit. The biters are a game mechanic to add time pressure to build your defenses up to par with your factory expansion. Sort of a deadline to stop you from navel gazing too much.

You can disable them entirely at game start, completely skip military tech, and your pollution cloud will still blight the land, poisoning trees and lakes (and fish) around you.

"You can disable them entirely at game start, completely skip military tech, and your pollution cloud will still blight the land, poisoning trees and lakes (and fish) around you."

You can turn off pollution too.

There are also mods that'll let you grow trees or fight pollution in other ways.

There's a cost to pollution in the vanilla game, when both pollution and biters are turned on, so it's not like this game is pro-pollution.

I have a bigger problem with nuclear waste having no consequences.

But even then... it's just a game!

I find it curious that some people get up in arms over the ethical issues in a game like Factorio, yet hardly anyone (outside the religious right) complains in all the violence in the most popular games of all: AAA first-person-shooters... or most games, really, as most of them place the player in the role of a killer, where you solve problems and win by learning to be a more effective killer.

Exactly, the first paragraphs read almost like satire.

I found the necessity to have a devastating impact on the planet's ecosystem fascinating. Even trying a "clean run" where you minimize pollution and number of killed aliens, you can't avoid the alien native's natural expansion. It's probably impossible to win without a lot killing.

That said, I don't think the game has bad intentions. It highlights the zero sum nature of resources and negatives of expansion at all costs.

Huizinga, the early theorist of games in culture, once remarked about contact bridge: "The incredible amount of productive social energy spent on this game could indeed be spent better, but in fact most likely would be wasted on something way worse"

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