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Comment by pharrington | Hacker News Reader

This essay highlights my core impression of Factorio that's kept me on the fence about buying it - it certainly looks like a fantastic game, but since I already enjoy designing programs and coding, every time I consider trying it out I just tell myself, "I'll just open up my text editor" instead. Is there a good selling point to push people like me past this mindset? Or is the game probably just not for me?

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I think the first analogy the author made to shenzen io is still a good one for factorio, just a lesser scale. This is engineering without many of the messy unfun parts. No setting up tool-chains, or build tools, or your environment and being totally lost in what to do. The game itself will (usually) not have bugs and it has a clearly defined goal (which can be difficult for things like personal projects if that part of the creativity/drive just isn't there). So even if it is a game that invokes the messy parts of engineering, it does so without actually making them sometimes intractable because it has been designed around those (and in fact is designed to specifically smooth out the curve of difficulty).

The other thing to keep in mind is that like many of the zachtronics games this one is not directly programming. The spatial orientation puzzles and 2d layout and organization of the factory is distinctly different from most programming. I would compare it to trying a language like Lisp or Haskell when has only used languages like C, C#, and Java. It's a totally different take on the concept of symbolic computation (re: programming). And it is one unlike any programming language you will have ever used. So if you enjoy the experience of learning new paradigms, and viewing classic computational ideas from the perspectives of those new paradigms, factorio might be fun for that.

Hopefully that's helpful.

To me, games like Factorio (and other programming games like Satisfactory, Human Resource Machine, and many of the Zacktronics games), mimic the fast edit-compile-debug loop and solution search that you get when you have minimized a problem to a core algorithm/data structure or some OOP design you are trying to refine.

They take away all of the boilerplate/dependency/platform busywork that you might need to do to actually ship something.

I don't know what it is (despite racking my brains about this for years), but there's something about Factorio that makes it much more fun for me than programming -- unless the programming I'm doing is something I'm intensely interested in, which programming for work rarely is.

It's like labview except the bugs try to kill you.

Factorio is like a distillation of programming so as to retain the fun parts and minimise the unfun parts.

What do I mean by the unfun parts of programming? Real-world stuff that you inevitably have to deal with but which distracts from the core purpose.

Things like: discovering a bug in a library you depend on; dealing with hardware issues; changing requirements; disagreements with colleagues over tooling; deadlines; dealing with users; ...

I was just thinking... what if Factorio it's the perfect waterfall project? clear and unchanging requirement (build and launch a rocket), infinite time, infinite resources, perfect technology. The only bugs are those attacking you from time to time. The only thing left to do is to implement the solution, in whatever manner you please, as long as the requirement is met. Maybe that's what keeps a programmer so addicted to it; with no stress of changing requirements, or pivoting, or deadlines, one can 100% focus on the technical part.

Great comment, this finally made it click for me as to why Factorio is such a perfect game

-to all sibling commenters

Thanks y'all. Yeah, basically I was dumb and somehow missed or ignored Factorio's demo. I downloaded and played a bit of the demo last night, and while it's certainly interesting, this type of resource based dynamic system builder just isn't for me if it lacks an adversarial agent.

Then again, while typing this reply, I searched for "competitive Factorio" and found this mod[1]. So, thanks for broadening my gaming horizons!

[1]https://mods.factorio.com/mod/team_competition

The aliens are specifically there to provide an adversarial agent. Unless that phrase means something different to you than it does to me.

I did not get that far!

first, i think there's a demo, so give it a taste for free if you're interested

second, it's similar to how watching a documentary is sort of like knowledge + entertainment. i think you'll find factorio pulls a lot of the same sorts of levers that designing programs and coding do, but it's a different feedback mechanism (visual, or base destroyed by biters) versus... well, i almost would say acceptance/integration tests, but if you're just brainstorming, it's not clear to me.

In your spare time, would you rather do programming projects, or play a game?

If you'd rather do programming, then keep doing what you're doing.

If you'd rather play a game, then download it and see if you like it. If you like it, then play it. If you don't then continue your current habit or search for a different game.

Think of it as a simulation of a load of event emitters / consumers, but you don't have to think about them yourself, allowing you to focus on hooking them up and solving issues like starvation or congestion all the time.

I think you should try the demo and see how it feels. If you’ve found yourself at this particular junction multiple times, might as well indulge and find out.

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