The other aspect is there are plenty of people that like to think like programmers, but have no experience programming and the barrier to entry for a videogame is substantially lower than even figuring out a "hello world!" program for someone who wouldn't even know how to pick a programming language.
It's instant gratification: I don't have as much fun practicing at .75x speed with a metronome to learn the hard part of a piece. Instead a video game tells me how great I am at "guitar" by being able to push buttons and strum on the beat, not to mention that I hear the sounds of my favorite songs come out when I do it.
For a similar reason, I like Rocksmith (guitar hero but with a real guitar), but the gratification is not quite so instant. They gamify the practicing part but I still need to do it, otherwise the part I'm playing actually sounds bad. And sight-reading is so much harder when there are more than 5 buttons.
Designing a satisfying skill progression takes a lot of work. I know what I will have to do if I, say, take up mandolin again seriously, and it's daunting- and worse, maybe it won't even lead to a satisfying or useful end... I will still do that at some point. I had the same feeling about cello or pedal steel guitar, and they all turned out okay.
At the same time I totally understand why following simple tutorials, running a preset course, climbing an established route, riding already-cleared bike trails, or playing a video game with few possible outcomes can be satisfying.
On the topic of complex games a la Factorio: I've been playing a lot of Age of Empires II with my friends lately and have come to enjoy it. I previously shied away from RTSes because I was terrified of the meta but I've gotten decent enough to consistently beat the CPU on Moderate. I have no shot of ever commanding an army of trebuchets and knights in real life so doing it on my ThinkPad via Proton is the next best thing :-D
- YouTuber “spirit of the law”
- watching some build order guides. Fast feudal and fast castle build orders are super useful
- watching commentated games of the Viper
If I’d spent all the time playing Guitar Hero playing an actual guitar instead, I’d be a real guitar hero.
I could also be a pro skater.
Being a simulated guitar hero and simulated pro skater is more enriching than the likely baseline of having zero experience with either.
And, video games can help in discovering real world passions — the number of guitarists who found their inspirational spark through Guitar Hero is likely significant. Same for Factorio or Minecraft -> programming.
From game I get instant gratification as if I play by the game guide/rules I can have something satisfying built in one evening.
however, this is the trap i always fall into - i have these vague targets like "learn vue" and spend the whole weekend trying to figure out how to install node on a windows machine and run a basic test
Personally I have a list of things to learn that could easily take several lifetimes.
e.g: making bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions
In fact there are probably infinitely many.
If you just walk up to the mailing list with the complete designs, documents, experimental results, schematics, trade offs, feasibility studies, you know what you're going to get? People saying "whoa, hey, great work but let's talk about this. I see here you've made assumption X about implementation area Y and that actually conflicts with the direction that we had in mind for the upcoming release, so let's talk more. To start, we'd like to see if we can explore option Z, thoughts?"
That ain't fun. It's rewarding but it ain't fun. Not like sitting down and messing with Legos in your own house is fun, or building a silly factory in Factorio is fun.
I know a person who 2x'ed BTLE transfer speeds by herself by coming up with a new protocol to talk to iPhones w/o the need for one of Apple's security chips.
Sufficient brainpower can do amazing things.
Nobody is going to believe anyone short of that bar would have even fully understood the bluetooth specification. So even a regular genius, 99.9th percentile HN user, would have a starting credibility of roughly zero.
But there are likely infinitely many waiting for that 99.9999th percentile HN reader to come along.
Also saw Facebook's experimental Diplomacy AI. Wish that were usable the time we lost a player.
From what I can tell, it seems like generally they're doing RAG over the game's wiki, and then reading it to you in an attractive-lady voice.
I find that pretty amusing.
It's perhaps too long, overflows the parser stack.
It's the trucking game for truckers in my mind, only a madman would play it after work.
Exactly yes, I wouldn't say it's only for engineers, it is perfect for smart people who chose a different path in life and need to feed this part of their brain with a fun simplified simulation of what it's like to be an engineer.
Of course, engineers would love this game, but we already engage in this type of activity all day much more intensely precisely because we love it, we already know how to do more interesting and valuable things with the same effort.
Similarly, I really lost the appetite for hard decision-making strategy games when I founded my startup. I was already having to take plenty of hard decisions, thank you very much, the real thing is much more interesting and more than enough.
Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
The advantage a game like factorio has over DtD is that you can kind of abandon huge sections and "start fresh" while still collecting rent from the work you did earlier to fund your new excursions. I guess DtD does this to a degree, but there's a lot less freedom of intellectual movement.
This is why I like Against the Storm. It is a novel (if familiar) challenge every time, and every time you "beat the odds" the game forces you to move on to the next harder challenge, "you beat this puzzle, you need a harder on."
so thats what made it too much like real life for me, because you're like struggling but then pretending like you are flexing (look at the size of my house! my farm!), but really everyone barely made it at all
maybe Against the Storm as a single player journey makes more sense
Against the Storm is all about setting up complex production chains, not necessarily linking them explicitly like in Factorio, but more about balancing resource availability and assigning workers. It's a lot like other resource-focused city builders like Anno, but it is very well designed to impose a constant pressure on the player, always on a rush to meet goals before the whole thing crumbles, constantly putting out fires in the system (sometimes literal fires).
The name is perfect, in that you build this complex machine, and it is constantly stress-tested by periodic hazards. It's an awesome rush to "hold-fast", scramble to desperately fix things, constantly on the edge, hoping that the storm will end soon because the whole thing is about to crumble, while rushing to fulfil the objectives so you can get out of there before it gets too bad.
Frospunk evokes this feeling really well too. I suppose Factorio is kinda similar with the alien attacks. Come to think of it, the pressure to feed the family and the final scramble for points in Agricola are not so dissimilar either.
Life is a slog if approached that way. Spending your time chasing more money instead of enjoying life is the quickest way to have a miserable existence.
But I wasn’t looking for devil’s advocate or solutions, us guys need to affirm each other’s experiences more often.
I also do enjoy very profitable sessions in life, the pursuit of money itself is fulfilling for me as it already is a massive multiplayer game pvp. Additionally, I would usually prefer to be doing entertainment options exclusive to the level of profits that have been manifested. But I love the existence that allows me to play video games with no consequence.
> there are many different levels each
the expansion adds separate planets and multiple space-platforms. So it moves away from the monolith and towards multiple smaller factories. (In the end-game you probably and up with a massive monolith again, but until then you will have multiple medium-sized factories).
> ... classic tower defense and using the layout of the map to your advantage to extract resources and kill bad guys
Each new area add some unique defense-need, e.g. in space you have to shoot at incoming asteroids, and on the lava-planet, you have to build temporary mining-outposts, that get eaten by worms after a couple of minutes. (The other planes probably add something like that too, but I haven't played so far yet)
The timeline (quick returns, but a long scale of challenges you can build up to. Lots of side projects out there with 0 users.)
You can play with friends
You can also pay 1/4 attention until you need to design something complex in the game. I find it fun, I can turn my brain off for a bit but then re/engage for the fun complex stuff.
I stopped playing as much myself because I wanted to either work on professional development (side projects, learning more) or actually make things with my hands (woodworking, chair making, fixing an old truck) that were real breaks from software engineering, and easier to share with my kids.
* edited for clarity, typos
I haven't played Factorio so far; for those who haven't programmed, do you think you're learning something new and somewhat transferable?
I also build side projects - but from the game I get instant gratification as I can build decent city with goal I have in one evening whereas side project to have anything I can say is pleasing takes much more time than one evening.
Games don't have annoying blockers like trying to use some new library, cities I build also did not work first times I was playing because I was noob - but even libraries frameworks I use on daily basis always have some kinks I have to figure out so it takes multiple evening anyway.
You don't have to make it your job.
In a similar way I think more people should change a flat tire or change the oil in their car. I think it will make them more aware, but they don't have to become a mechanic.
[1] A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another. It involves a significant change of status in society.
You're on big space rock, dude.
What makes a side project better than Factorio?
I agree that "contributing to society" has no intrinsic value. It is my own.
I feel like I waste my time when I play video games, but this is recent. I used to play a lot till age 24 or something. This feeling stops me from playing, but even if I do end up playing, I feel guilty afterwards that my time went to something that ultimately "does not matter". That said, playing something for fun is entertainment, it should matter, but I still get those feelings nevertheless. I hope this makes sense. I am not trying to argue that "fun" does not matter, I suppose I am just not so fun anymore. :P
It depends though, if I play a video game with my girlfriend it is alright.
The games I play instead are wholly unrelated to my work life, such as FPS or RPG ones, where there is a clear distinction between what I can do and what I want to do.
"Okay wth, today we're going to make the entire base solar powered"
When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad.
But in Factorio? Nobody is using it so sure, make it bizzare. Change the rules, let yourself go. Don't test the design just send it.
Bored? Too challenging? Don't bother finishing the design do something else.
This makes me sad.
You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
Git is weird and bizarre (especially when initially released), but it’s used and well loved.
Hear, hear. I would tell you all about the tools my household runs on but it is as you say. Still gives me a lot of satisfaction to make stuff that makes life better, and for someone more adventurous than me it might also be something you can use to try out new technologies or build something for on your CV. The only downside is that internet connectivity being down means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it and better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way!
> need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it
^ remote access
and
> better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way
^ unreliable tech
I don't understand the first point though, do you mean I should set up remote access? Because that's definitely there, it's just that if the uplink is down on the ISP's side or whatever, then you can't access the system outside the house. Or if I were to host it outside the house, then you just shift the SPOF to a different location. What are you suggesting or pointing out exactly?
Exactly what I wrote above.
You hadn't shared your setup by then tho, which you now have. So I don't know what to tell you.
Re-read what you replied to and then you might not need to formulate such empty questions.
I use this with obsidian and it's a game changer, removing need for the cloud
More than one person can be in the grocery store. Syncing a file does not work because you overwrite each other's changes; this is what we started with but this is why I made (what I call) multiplayer groceries in the first place
And note that I also don't need a "cloud"; it's hosted on my own system rather than someone else's
> The only downside is that internet connectivity being down means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it
Wireguard or Tailscale Inc. are not magically going to resolve that situation. Does Tailscale even work locally if your internet is down or does it require their cloud for NAT punching regardless of whether you're on the server's LAN? For starters
I am getting disgusted by people who need to have that screen in their hand, all waking hours.
I mean, maybe some of this will be blunted over time as open source slowly eats away at these utilities, but until then I view my phone like a grenade, or a drug, or a slot machine, or a money-eater.
Why anyone wanted to unlock their door with their phone instead of tapping a fob, I’m not sure, but the only interesting feature (temp access for friends) doesn’t seem worth it.
I would want to do it with my phone because then I only have to have one thing to carry around with me. I haven't carried a key ring in years. I don't even carry a wallet these days. It's really quite useful. Way fewer trips back to fetch the keys/wallet, etc.
I would prefer this to be a keyring over a phone for aforementioned reasons. Secondly, the app is buggy and often just fails to work. Third, it takes a good deal of time to take out the phone and fumble around with the software.
All in all, it's a pretty miserable experience.
Carrying a single thing (which has a bunch of other uses than just access control) doesn't feel like a burden to me.
That said, I don't disagree at all that the typical keypad for access control on everything pretty much sucks. My front door has like 4 buttons only and does the telephone keyboard thing of using the same button for multiple 'numbers' in your code. Time to jump on amazon to look for a decent front door lock that works with my phone :)
As the person who started this discussion about needing software for household things, let me be clear that this is not the sort of situation I'm talking about! The things I use, I either made or maintain myself because it's my hobby. Nobody needs to use them who doesn't want to and there is no cut. I think the conversation diverges here as this is not the same situation! Probably anyone would agree that being forced to use something or other is very different from being able to use something or other.
Why do I even need a smartphone the go to a restaurant and eat something? Why would anyone effectively refusing service to people who don't have smartphones or do not want to use them? If I need their service and have money to pay for it why would they put additional obstacles in my way? What's their motivation for scaring of a potential customer using totally arbitrary criteria that has nothing to do with the service they provide?
Oh, I hate it so much.
- I'm not always home when I decide to want to buy something, so then I couldn't write it on that paper
- We go shopping together most of the time. That screen lets you check items off and sync that to the other person's that screen. Alternatively, there is a mode where it gives each participant a subset of the items so you don't get duplicate things
- That screen can give you the list in the right order if you just tell the app one time what layout a store has (e.g. first the bread and breakfast things, then the cooling section, then the freezer section.. those sorts of categories)
- That screen can also work with a map function where it does a traveling salesperson problem to find a good path to walk down to get each item, but this requires entering the location of everything rather than just having everything broadly categorized
- That screen suggests things you frequently buy, so it's one tap for what you commonly need
- That screen can temporarily hide items you are going to get in the next store, so you can glance and see that the list is clear and you're good to go check out and then unhide the things when you enter the next store
- That screen can automatically add items from recipes you've added
- You have that screen anyway. The pen and paper, on the other hand, are consumables
We could forego all these benefits for, eh, not being "glued", whatever the advantage in that is. It's not like I'm getting distracted by notifications in the store if that's what you're worried about
I'm getting the distinct impression that handwriting human language may be beyond the basic capabilities of the Modern Human.
Seems to be memory and basic cognitive difficulties such as "sorting" whatever that means when actually buying the stuff in the store. I've been buying stuff in stores constantly for 50 years and I'm very fast, without aid.
But boy howdy these devices sound like just the tool for people with actual cognitive difficulties; we should make definitely sure that they have them. Might be a problem though on the data entry side.
edit: improve accuracy
It's a rare situation though, otherwise it would have been worth it to make a proper app that caches all data locally rather than a webpage
Some people, like myself, enjoy writing code but need a purpose to write code. If I don’t have a reason, or problem to solve, I can’t just sit down and start coding.
Endless fun to be had trying to recreate shaders and having cool ideas for different vfx.
That’s okay too :)
Working on something that feels like it’s only useful as a way to extract money is incredibly unrewarding in my experience, to the point of increasing my feeling of burnout.
It solved a problem they had and I’m proud of it but yea it’s incredibly niche and useful to a very select few people.
I’m mostly, personally, talking about building toy apps or hacking my microwave to play Doom. Not throwing shade at those who do, it’s just not what motivates me.
I gotta say, I think I agree.
Maybe it's just rose-tinted-glasses, but I remember a time when software was split between "IBM-Corpo" culture, and zany SV/MIT/Caltech culture where people threw things at the wall and proceeded when stuff stuck.
It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo, and everyone feels the need to be ever-productive and adhere to strict rules and schema.
tl;dr : I remember when the fun Factorio game was qbasic.exe and no one blinked about it. We all had fun.
(p.s. I love factorio now too)
I think about this whenever I see a new open source library hosted on its own domain with a polished and slick promo material. I really don't mean to throw shade at designers for making nice designs, but it just feels weird and corporate-y to me that the polish is a priority.
There are, of course, open source projects that serve as a hook for selling SaaS products, which is corporate by nature and thus doesn't trigger the same feeling in me.
otoh lack of basically centralized source control / git / hub / lab etc would also be missed dearly
depending on context: corporate polish can be fine; especially if software "is infra"; let truly (?) fun inconsequential software be messy and / or fun if sparks joy
apropos permaculture: i enjoyed TIS-100 but never got interested by factorio (maybe its art?) but anyways i'd personally find it more interesting to see more declarative / triggered simulation / play out in ever interesting ways
so maybe biologic systems over industry in space?
maybe there exist such games already? they do in my mind at least; i should look into current simulation frameworks maybe and read up on ecology
TIS has a much tighter game loop with hard success metrics for each challenge.
I wouldn’t really compare the two.
In some ways, this reminds me of Guitar Hero and its set of games. As great as those are for getting into music, once you're already into it, it can feel like time that could have been better spent on deliberate practice or at least some good old jamming for fun. I do love games, as long as they don't take up too much time and have an ending. In an earlier life I've already burned plenty of midnight oil on similarly "open ended" play (4X and other strategy or construction games are the worst traps for me). I'd rather finish BG3 at some point - at least that one has a definitive end to the player's story and is a bit more of a change of scenery from what I do for a living (building and optimizing systems).
Then again... maybe I'll finally try Satisfactory which I own through Humble Choice IIRC; or maybe I should avoid doing that at all costs for the reasons above... ;)
TL;DR IT'S A TRAP
Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky’s party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes of Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper with his Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with the Indonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat.
Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sitting three miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all the arguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff—why not watch it on television, since you’ll be miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, he appreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides. The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers broke from their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some flaming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned into trances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper later recalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, “like some kind of sacrifice.”
The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future—yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large—certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation—all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing.
Gosper’s revelation led him to believe that the hackers could change things—just make the computers bigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that. While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, a magical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological Walden Pond, something was essentially lacking.
The world.
As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. The movement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in the seventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to ask for specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research were drying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would have directly increased the government’s ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and at home). Minsky thought the policy was a “losing” one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But there was no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. And slowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computer studies, the Institute’s attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to look for teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratic hassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses.
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
----
Factorio is hacking again. It's kludging it together to make it work. When you read things like https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics or the JK latch and the SR latch ( https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/92tdgm/jk_latch_s... and https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#... ) and get into r/technicalfactorio/ it is reminiscent of HACKMEM ( https://archive.org/details/HAKMEM ) written by Beeler, Gosper, and Schroeppel.
Big and flashy bets are expensive, many small bets are a far, far better way to explore the design space, especially now that we can share all the results with almost no cost.
Having lots of fun tinkering with Proxmox, Wled, Shelly devices to manipulate electric rollers, and more. Couldn’t quite get Valetudo running on my robot vacuum (my model isn’t the easiest to hack) but the concept is so cool. Triggering automations With dirt cheap NFC tags or a cheap wireless numpad is so satisfying.
Building an *arr stack is another area where there’s tons of amazing creativity online and the hacker spirit still lives on.
The formerly-counterculture conventions got so cult and big they grew a counter-counterculture of smaller places.
Outside the walls of the AI SaaS grind. There be life.
In Factorio, the things you make don't need to have *any* appeal. It's just fun.
If you have more fun making random wonky software, that's great for you and I'm happy for you. But I personally find Factorio to be more fun than software when I'm trying to enjoy my days off. (at least, some of the time. Sometimes I have fun making software too but only if I have that 'itch'. With Factorio, it's fun even if I don't have an itch)
The core of Git is incredibly simple and elegant (content addressable database). It's an amazing approach to how to represent the data that needs representing.
The UI is the challenging bit, and that's because Linus just slapped something on to demonstrate it, expecting that a proper UI would be built over the plumbing he'd created.
Which makes it weird and bizarre. Especially in the context of this whole discussion. Not really sure what you’re trying to say.
I think it's an extremely powerful tool, and it's worth knowing how to wield it well, but that power comes at the expense of user friendliness, especially for junior devs who don't have an intuition of git internals and how commands map to them.
You probably haven’t used it enough, honestly.
Rebasing, reflogs, pickaxes, 3 way merges, merge directions, the fact that merge directions are reversed during rebases, are all weird things that are pretty specific to git.
At least as far as how they’re presented
> First time I hear such nonsense
You don’t seem to listen very closely. Linus himself recognized git’s perceived weirdness in a talk he gave about it years ago.
https://kagi.com/search?q=criticism+of+git&r=us&sh=-Tk-oKViO...
When I asked Kovařík about this, he brought up Euro Truck Simulator, a wilfully mundane game about hauling cargo. The developers, who are friends of his, once told him that many of their most enthusiastic players are ... truckers. Truckers who spend their time off from their trucking jobs pretending to do more trucking ... a lot of people actually enjoy the work they do. They just don’t always enjoy their jobs that much, because of all the things that get in the way of the work.- Modern Farming. Has really good working models of expensive farming equipment. There are videos of real farmers playing it.
- Lawnmower Simulator. Yes, really. Mow enough lawns, get a better mower.
- Power Wash Simulator. Not kidding.[1]
The first game in this category was probably the famous Desert Bus.
How is that a personal attack?
Such freedom is extremely rare when you get paid for writing or maintaining software.
If you’re building oss with no users, or just for yourself, you’re functionally doing something more like art than coding in terms of how you prioritize and execute.
I sometimes do project euler puzzles for fun. I'm a CS professor - this starts to feel kinda close to my job. But it's relaxing and there's no pressure and no one is affected when I screw up; I just get to keep kicking at it, or put it down. The freedom makes a big difference.
The "solving an interesting problem" part of my job is the part I love. It's the other stuff I need a break from sometimes. :)
Also, I just think it’s good to not look at something that’s too much like work once in a while. Even if factorio is closer than many other things.
Sue you do. And you’re not obliged to keep it in some workable form just because they use it, they can use something else.
More counter-examples: LaTeX, vim, Regex, Blender, SAP, most Unix CLIs...
This thought changed me from someone who plays games to someone who makes games.
The only real game I find entertaining and fun these days is Rocket League, everything else feels slow and boring or I could be using this energy for something else.
Not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse.
You will have something to show for it: Joy.
If your only interest is to invest effort into producing something that provides some kind of physical value, then of course work will be more interesting than games.
Development has fun parts and it has tedious parts. The tedious parts are what usually makes for a good product. Factorio removes that part; because it is not about producing a product, it's about having fun.
> Not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse.
That's up to you, but for me it'd be a curse, not being able to do thing just for fun anymore, because of always feeling a pressure to be productive.
Factorio also has tons of tedious parts. It really isn't all that different in that regard in my experience.
There are many games these days that are designed to have a certain element of tediousness (grind) in them, because this gives you the sense of being productive without actually producing anything.
> That's up to you, but for me it'd be a curse, not being able to do thing just for fun anymore, because of always feeling a pressure to be productive.
I don't think they mean to say they always feel a pressure to be productive. If it costs you exactly the same amount of energy and you get the same amount of joy from it, then why would you not choose an activity that produces something of enduring value?
I would say that the only boring part is before you get bots. Then your role shifts from builder to designer. All the tools given to you (ctrl+c/x, up/downgrade planners, rail autocomplete, ...) just make building effortles, and most of your time is spent in design, analyzing and debugging your factory, while the changes are done for you as you work.
For diversion, I try disconnecting from screens and doing something healthy that involves the use of my physical body. I find walking, hiking, swimming and running very enjoyable. I'm also a big fan of tennis, racquetball and table tennis. I still play video games occasionally when there's not an option to engage with the physical world for diversion but I really prefer chess to most modern video games.
Key word: can.
You can also waste your time and end up with something no one will use. In fact, that's the likely outcome — there are many repos on Github with 0 stars, after all. Factorio is designed to reward you for your efforts. The real world has no such guarantees.
Factorio and other open ended optimization games scratch the same itch as programming without any payoff. Speed running feels different because execution is so important optimal changes over time, and you get a finite endpoint.
I don't play Factorio for the same basic reason as so many others in this thread: it's too much like programming, and I want to use that energy actually programming. Something I enjoy very much, something which has paid every expense I've had for the last fifteen years, and something which directly produces value for other people.
I also pick up a little handheld most evenings and play games on it. Lately, Puzzle Bobble and Galaxian. Scratches a different itch.
The dichotomy between 'play Factorio' and 'program computer' does not reduce to the dichotomy between 'have fun' and 'joylessly pursue productive endeavors'. Clearly for some people Factorio doesn't produce the former dichotomy in the first place, and more power to 'em. For others it does, and the conclusion that this means we don't like fun is simply invalid.
My LBP2 levels had 50ish hearts. My Android Game got 15k downloads
In the meantime I always could choose between similar joys based on future professional benefits like programming vs gaming. Factorio is like programming so for me I play it whenever I can with my friends (aka almost never), but otherwise I am programming
I also don’t get people who look up YouTube videos on how to do things in Factorio.
What’s the fun part left to do if you just use someone else’s factory or belt design?
The gameplay is fun at first. You have a ressource and something you want to produce. You look at the ratio of things, what the layout you will have to put in place, how fast things will have to move. You painfully build that. It works. You feel good. Then you realise it will just be more of the same ad infinity with the first time you do train design and liquids the sole inkling of novelty. It’s all fairly simple conceptually so it gets tedious and boring quite fast (at least to me). I think part of the issue is also that I tend to play it wrong by calculating and planning - literally work for which the in game tooling is not optimal - while I think I would have more fun just winging it and fixing things as they happen.
What I mean is I think it’s not a game for everyone but I can see why it’s catnip for its intended audience.
I like the Seablock pack - the core premise is that you crash land on a water world, and need to extract all your resources from water. The production loops are much more complicated (you start having to deal with byproduct management just an hour or two in), but in return there's almost no enemy time pressure. It also includes some ingame recipe-planner mods, so it's easier to plan-then-build.
Meanwhile, yeah, at least half my time is spent working around earlier mistakes. A main bus always works, but spaghetti is what makes the game fun.
While we're on the topic of assuming intent: that invented word "problematic" - problematic to whom? Something being a problem is almost always a subjective stance, not a universal truth as that word implies.
I can play the min-max game without any unknowns that comes from real life management. Or I can destroy everything and mess everything up too.
It's my escapism.
Minecraft with a kid was my gateway drug and I got into Factorio really quickly after. It’s actually a really special game. There are elements of it that are practice for real world scenarios, but it is very relaxing, stress free and commitment free. It’s a great game to sit down with for an hour after work to decompress and become normal again.
It’s also an incredibly fun game to share with a group of people on one device. That’s something I haven’t experienced since the 1990s, but it’s really enjoyable to get together with a group and build together. It’s an excellent cooperative game and is a great way to really get to know people. It’s even more fun when you play it with people from a range of professions - one of my favourite Factorio groups is a bartender, a cook, a lawyer and a software developer. We think differently but when it all comes together, it’s really neat.
I understand that it’s not for everyone and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t have nearly the reflexes for FPS so we’re likely quite different in terms of the games we like. But I find it very relaxing and very enjoyable. It reminds me a lot of QBasic on an old Tandy - it’s that same thrill of tinkering because tinkering is fun.
(Don’t think I want to start a debate, I loved the 3 games and played them a lot, it’s just that Satisfactory won my heart… even the name is great).
Not entirely sure why Factorio is more addictive. Shorter action loops, but often queing and waiting for things to happen might jiggle the brain in a more addictive way. It's not a positive feeling situation either, more like you get trapped having to do more stuff over and over again.
It’s just different games. Factorio is excellent as building production lines while Satisfactory is excellent as making feel you « in » your creations with 3D, a lot of architectural options, a really immersive sound design (quitting your noisy machine room to a corridor and hearing the sound go down when the door closes).
It’s different. But there is one important common thing with Factorio though : they are both made with a lot of love and with a lot of attention to every detail. In fact, both games could be an exemple of design and ergonomics for even professional softwares.
After beating prepatch PCR, I switched back to Call of Duty for a bit.
I think my attitude changed the games I play also. I used to play MMO when I was younger but FPS games give me that dopamine rush without any commitments.
Sadly it's only when I'm sick do I feel I'm able to just cozy up without these "you can be doing something else" thoughts and truly enjoy games for what they are, tedious or not.
Everything you describe requires interaction with people. Those are too often toxic, incompetent, overly demanding and keep changin schedules and priorities. At least in single player games you get to drop all that crap.
Consequently, that's why I'm so disinterested in learning these games. The discussion about them shifts into a thin one layer abstraction for other people to try to brag about their accomplishments and what they self injected as their experience instead of the game itself. This doesn't affect the gameplay, but it affects my perception of the game as a shallow vehicle for attention seekers more than it promotes the ideas of fun gameplay.
That said, sometimes the style of gameplay resonates with a style of development you might have been interested in understanding more and can use it as a way to get motivation or inspiration for ideas. Automating pipelines, physics simulations, etc. I think it's always worth a shot on games that have notable recognition of quality to see if it jives with what you enjoy, but it's been the exception more than the rule in my case.
This is me, but extended to all games. I stopped playing games because I feel like I can always do something more productive with my time instead. If I really want to check out, I watch some TV instead. But games (especially modern ones) take too much work without any real reward.
Ironically the game goal is to leave that place :D
You then walk away from the game, inspired to apply such process-thinking to your actual work and life, and realize that it's actually rare to be able to do.
But I like the fact that I can see it working in realtime, its just pretty, this machine I built that I can zoom into and see the smallest detail actually working.
Wish software was more like that, a good debugger can get closer to that but way more clunky and poor performing than Factorio.
I agree debugging tools could make more use of visualisation. I remember the excellent HTML 3d view in Firefox, removed from version 47. For some reason we can't have nice things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqHV625EU3E
Not sure if there's a way to get it back. I heard it's available in Edge, but I don't use that browser.
It started with games that are basically engineering work. But now it's anything with resource management or long-term strategic thinking (basically whenever I think "hmm, I need to note down my thoughts so I can pick up my strategy where I left of next time I play").
Now that is what I call tedious!
Meanwhile open ended pvp multiplayer games can drain hundreds of hours with no feeling of accomplishment. Those are the games that make me feel I should be doing something more productive.
And, even Factorio being my favorite game, I still need to take a long breaks from it because building a factory is a lot of mental effort.
I wish real programming tools were this much fun.
But same with pico 8, I just want a real ide, debugger, unit tests. If I'm not getting those better be getting paid
The people I spoke with were from the Army. And they found CS-style games agonizing to watch. So many people running around with no plan, so much friendly fire, so many unrealistic tactics. You could practically see them shudder.
They also had some people who worked in logistics. I remember one of them saying, "If the United States decides to invade a country, the software we wrote could calculate how much toilet paper we'd need."
Do you finally get it now?
If you plan your build properly, you can avoid this, but it takes a few runs to learn the best strategies.
Problem solving and optimizing in Factorio is different than a grind in some game like Diablo. That sort of grind uses a completely different part of your brain (movement and in-the-moment decision making), and I find that I need that kind of change after a week of real-life problem solving.
I imagine people who gravitate to Factorio are probably better problem solvers and optimizers than me because that’s what they truly enjoy for its own sake.
On the surface, I guess. But Diablo is a game about dungeon crawling and Factorio is a game where you make the dungeon. You aren't looking for good loot rolls to make your character better in Factorio, you're trying to reassemble the pieces of a poorly-designed infrastructure network to make it efficient enough for your goals.
Really there are so many types of programming that Factorio's proximity to your day-to-day work will vary on the field. If you are a frontend web designer, then Factorio will probably feel pretty fresh and novel to you. If you're an SRE/SWE that rips apart musty codebases to see what's salvageable, Factorio's loop of refreshing and optimizing can feel eerily similar in some respects.
With the understanding that you can regularly leave Factorio running overnight or even all week to build up resources, how many hours have other hard core Factorio players logged?
My Factorio play time is up to 6,573.2 hours at this point.
I love Factorio for the same reasons I love SimCity. 6,573.2 hours seems like a lot of time, but I've probably logged even more hours playing SimCity since 1989. (But much of that was actual productive time porting it to various platforms, testing, debugging, and optimizing the actual source code and user interface, etc.)
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
I habitually translate "X thousands of hours" into "full time employment years".
You've been playing Factorio as the equivalent of a full time job, for 3 years and 3 months.
[Edit: Many of those hours were probably background farming, so not a direct comparison.]
Just modeling what we (US, 40hrs/wk and 50wks/yr) consider a "full-time" commitment to any task/activity.
Factorio was the last game I played. I lost a weekend and ended up with a raging headache.
Before that an MMORPG did the same
A year before that it was Civilization IV, exactly the same, lost an entire weekend then never played it again.
I don't think I am suited to games. Or maybe I just need more free time
Life is all about experiences. I am sad for those who go through life without experiencing video games in moderation. They provide one of a kind interactive experiences that you won't find anywhere else in life.
Some games really reward spending more time with them, and getting into the "flow". I think playing Factorio for an hour and then stopping would just feel frustrating - like cooking up a delicious meal, eating a spoonful, and running out the door.
I wonder if they'll pay for their employees' copies of Wilmot's Warehouse, too.
Edit: official forum link stating thus: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=159626#p159626
I was wondering if I somehow missed it going on sale, or it never had.
Glad I know it isn't likely to any time soon.
He's a longtime Starcraft fan for example, and offered an ex Starcraft pro a job on the strength of that alone.
There is a reddit thread where he participated in that had some interesting perspectives that I think may be of interest to this forum: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dl3o2p/billionai...
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wowzers, "hate" is not a strong enough word for how I feel about that raging piece of junk. Holy hell, I'll never get that 15 minutes of my life back
At least it doesn't take up the whole basement like the sets previous generations played with.
I work in performance - a space where we're thinking about threading, parallelism and the like a lot - and I often say "I want to hire who play with trains". What I mean is "I want people who play Factorio", because the concepts and problems are very very similar. But fewer people know Factorio, so I say trains instead.
I think I know why it's enjoyable even though it's so close to work, too. It's the _feedback_. Factorio shows you visually where you screwed up, and what's moving slowly. In actual work the time and frustration is usually in finding it.
Versus say Call of Duty or whatever that you might lose yourself in, which is also not productive, but bears no resemblance to work.
Pilot communities probably say similar things about flight sims (or flight components of games) that aren't good enough to be useful practice?
The analog controls in real life are heavier, more raw, somewhat imprecise, and you can feel them knocked around by the wind for example. Night and day difference. It honestly makes the most state of the art simulator feel like you’re operating a NES.
When I first started flying my instructor specifically recommended against flight sims for that very reason.
Now that I have my PPL I only use them to practice approaches for new airports that I’ve never visited before and to familiarize myself with the cockpit layout for planes I haven’t flown before. It helps build some minor muscle memory so I can focus on the harder parts of flying.
but that's the extend of it, you don't have to do heavier programming practice like algorithm, complex state management, input parsing and validation (unless sushi), or anything involving combinators until finishing the 1.0 version.
For typical gameplay, the only puzzles you run into are the ones you build yourself into. The name of game is to design your factory in a modular and extensible way so that you do not build yourself into a puzzle.
many people feel it feels similar to coding, in the way you have to slowly refactor designs + work involves a recursive breakdown of tasks + tracing/debugging of issues
And I think that's mostly due to the lack of constraints in most programming jobs. I don't have to think about throughput or optimizing op codes or almost anything else because our machines have absurd amounts of compute and more memory than most hard drives I've had in my life, the networks are broad and fast, and there's a commercial solution for most of the hard problems.
Maybe I'd think differently if I worked on microcontrollers, but my brief foray into Arduinos and Raspberry Pies didn't feel that much different. I mean, I was using Python on the Arduino. I felt more constrained by the pins than anything else - another problem with several well explored solutions.
I’ve hated puzzle games all my life. Most likely because they’re artificial.
That’s why startups appeal to me, because they appeal to my nature. It’s in my nature to desire being productive.
So asking “why must you always be productive” on a site full of startup enthusiasts … well, you’re going to get a lot of the same answers
Scratch that - I'm using "money" as a proxy for "value". Let's talk value directly. All things being equal, if I can enjoy Activity A totally in isolation, and Activity B equally much, but B leaves something behind which other people can use and get their own value out of, then B is clearly a better or more noble use of my time. Being productive just makes you a better person on net.
Now... I do not choose the "max productivity" strat with each and every second of my being, far from it. I'll probably buy and play Factorio sometime in the next few months, and it will be Steam game #3 added to my library after FTL and Slay the Spire. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend it is somehow better for the world outside of myself to play Factorio rather than e.g. improve the FOSS software I maintain that helps people learn Finnish. Let alone something like contribute to the Linux kernel. This is a philosophical non-question to me.
When I play games, I never play competitive or intense games, I see it as a therapeutic activity.
I play relaxing single player games like Stardew Valley or Tiny Glade. Cultivate some crops, feed my chicken, pat my cat. No real end goal other than to just relax. I urge anyone to try, especially in co-op with with a friend or partner. It really is therapeutic.
I’ve wanted to play Valheim for ages. I even bought the Factorio DLC on launch day and barely played it because nobody wanted to play.
For some the latter is facotrio. I tried it myself, didn't get past the demo. I think if I'm doing something not productive in terms of not using my time towards something that actively makes me money, I would feel better doing something like learning another programming language, do some quick projects to automate parts of my life, try to write myself a game or a piece of toy software that challenges me and is also fun to implement.
I think I'd rather do those than play facotrio.
Everyone has different ways of unwinding and finding meaning, and productivity doesn’t need to be the sole measure of time well spent, at least for me anymore.
Though, with AI looming to take this last shred of human dignity too, maybe having a bit of fun along the way isn't such a bad idea.
Ironically, Factorio is all about productivity. Mine more resources, produce more items, expand more land and build more factory.
Plus I'm going to die unlike when I was an immortal teenager, so I want to retire ASAP.
If I'm going to game it'll be an FPS or similar when I'm too brain dead to play when-will-i-be-a-millionaire.
Trivia on farming: Medieval peasants worked far less than modern employees (at most 150 days a year). It was obviously harder physical work than sitting in an office all day, but they had plenty of downtime
Anyway, if you like Factorio, you might also enjoy Mindustry: simmilar-ish, less constructional depth, more tower-defence and fighting.
https://www.ft.com/content/b9e419c6-acf1-420b-8ae6-908feb52c... ("How ‘Factorio’ seduced Silicon Valley — and me")
(Cool fourth-wall breaking moment seeing an HN'er featured in the FT!)
Three HNers (at least!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xal
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593117
(Also, I am typing this while alt-tabbed out of Factorio...)
https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
(Unfortunately one would have to scroll back through 3 years' worth of other things to run across it, but it's on my list to fix that and it's squirreled away there for the future)
* Play your first game without mods (or very limited QoL mods)
* Don’t use blueprints from others online (at least in your first play through), you can watch videos if you are truly stuck but copy/pasting what others have done can ruin the fun
* Don’t always try to min/max. If that’s what you like then more power to you but I often guess at things or over-provision because it lets me keep playing and not get bogged down
* Before you look for blueprints online use something like Helmod or Factory Planner, blueprints can really ruin the game for me at least. The one exception is belt balancers, those are fine to copy. You can share your own blueprints between games but taking blueprints from online feels too much like cheating. Study them and reproduce them if you need to but I promise it will be more satisfying to do it yourself rather than just plopping down what someone else did.
* Don’t try to build the best or “final” version of something at first. As in, build what you need now and re-evaluate later when it’s not enough. I’ve ruined the “fun” before because I was too hung up on making a production line too complicated/large/etc too early. Don’t make your first smelting operation at a scale you’d use in late game, you’ll build a new smelting setup later and that’s fine.
* Go into the game blind, don’t research “the best way to do X”, your first (few) play throughs will be more fun if explore and learn on your own.
If you zoom in, the graphics are high-res 2D sprites, rendered from 3D models. And the level of detail can be ridiculous. From this week's Factorio 2.0 update (and Space Age add-on), here's an example of the zoomed-in detail: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-396 See the foundry animations? Those videos are actually slightly more blurred than the in-game version. And the sound effects are synced to specific animation frames.
So the world of Factorio is oftentimes brown and grim and covered in grime, but that's a conscious artistic choice. (Not all of the new planets are brown. Gleba is green and irridescent and frankly creepy.) Similarly, Factorio's 2D nature has allowed the developers to focus on gameplay and quality-of-life more than many newer games in the genre. If you want to build big, intricate factories with complex train networks, for example, Factorio really shines.
If anyone would like a game with 3D graphics, or a different graphics style, try:
- Satisfactory: The 3D world is gorgeous, and Satisfactory shines at "walk around inside your factory and tinker with it." Gameplay-wise, it has only recently gained blueprinting tools that allow working at a medium level of abstraction.
- Shapez 2.0: This is pretty and colorful and full of great little puzzles. It occupies a different part of the game-design space and is just a joy to play.
(Dyson Sphere Project and Captain of Industry also have great gameplay, but I don't know if their graphics are likely to grab people who find Factorio graphically underwhelming.)
There's also Shapez 1 and 2, which is like the essence of Factorio abstracted into shapes and colors. Shapez 2 has more mining and trains and multiple levels.
Satisfactory's main issue is that it lets you build in three dimensions without doing any physics to check if that build is mechanically plausible. It's of course not reasonable to expect them to do that physics. But it means that sophisticated logistics/organization problems in Factorio almost always have the same solution in Satisfactory: build more, but upwards. There's no reason to think long-term in Satisfactory unless you have a specific aesthetic vision for a base. Of course, a giant factory-skyscraper with tons of conveyor belts sticking out looks really cool! And Satisfactory being easier makes it more of a chill sandbox game than a tense strategy game like Factorio, so I get why aesthetics-minded people like it. Different strokes.
Course that means I often had oversupply.
Because your phrased your question like people that complain about the level of detail. Yes, factorio is ugly (although some trees are beautiful). And yes, that's a design decision.
There are some mods that reskin it. Personally, I don't think any of them are beautiful.
1. It’s simple, charming, and nostalgic.
2. I view it as a defense mechanism against the onslaught of modern gaming that’s locked in a race to the lowest common denominator (i.e. “Stay away! This game isn’t for you!” ;) )
Terrain looks better, trees look better, too, I think it's a pretty big change.
Any chance you have the game set to use 16-bit color?
I had this experience with Eve Online back in the day. The optimization limit horseshoes back into the real world.
Case in point: just reading this thread started me learning about discrete event simulation. Damn you Factorio.
Bonus points if it's open source.
Level of fun/addictiveness: Factorio<<<----, Shenzhen I/O, TIS-100, Nandgame, nand2tetris
Best story: Tossup for Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100, Factorio, nand2tetris, nandgame
Best order if you've never coded and want to get tricked into becoming an engineer: Factorio (but hard limit yourself here to no more than 2000 hours), then TIS-100, then Shenzhen I/O, then the Nands. I think Nand2tetris is more accessible as a learning tool.
Upshot - I highly recommend this list. :) Space Age (the Factorio DLC) has me wanting to do nand2tetris in Factorio now. Resisting..
Works on mobile, desktop, Linux, etc.
[0]: https://prisonjournalismproject.org/2024/03/31/popular-video...
I’d still say that at AUD$100
> If I have to do it in an inefficient way, or the way I’m told to, it feels like work.
> When I have the freedom to do it my way, it feels like fun.
Yeah, that resonates with me. I didn't pursue a software development career because of this. Decided to do something else and enjoy programming on my own terms. It's been alright but I still wonder what might have been.
Also, if you like Factorio Youtube videos, I'm a big fan of https://www.youtube.com/@DoshDoshington