How Much Are Games Like Factorio Sapping The Intellectual Potential Of Humanity?
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Much of my early computer education was learned because I wanted to play games and my parents didn't know how to make them work. Making boot disks, etc. was a big part of my early exposure to computers.
I played a lot of original Sim city, among other things, and organically over time I had devised , as a kid, a whole elaborate saving and naming system for my cities that involved versions and forking. Later, as an engineer in regulated industries, I've realized that what I built as a kid was a (nearly) ISO compliant revision and document management system.
Factorio is fine.
I'm worried about first person shooters, I think games where there is less intellectual aspect to them and more twitch reactive reflex stuff there is the less "good" it is for the players soul, and development.
First person shooters may well breed the next gen of fighter pilots or snipers. Or maybe they'll enhance someone's dadflex and save a child from incoming danger.
If you say Factorio is fine, then you can't say anything else is any different.
It's like chess, or any other strategic game. There is a big argument that they teach us things.
Just like team sports. It teaches us life skills.
I argue that Factorio teaches more directly applicable life skills to the average person. Most jobs now involve solving some kind of problem using creativity and clicking/typing on a computer.
Yes there are corner cases where it's nice to be a ninja. But most of us click and type on a computer all day solving problems a computer can't. First person shooters can be automated quite easily and have been, playing factorio, chess, etc. Are different. Yes they can still be automated, but it's clearly a higher bar.
Factorio is no more of a problem-solving game than a first-person shooter is. There is a lot going on in a player's mind when playing FPS that may not be obvious, such as planning ahead, quick thinking and anticipating the opponents' movements. Those are also valuable skills that can be applied to many areas of life.
Take Overwatch for example. There are role-based characters that fill a specific function in the game that require thinking, planning, and experience. It is also a team sport that teaches life skills.
I do not see how automation can 'solve' that for you. It is not just purely finding the thing on the screen and clicking on it. They are not just solely twitch-based reactionary games.
As with anything in life, too much chess/Factorio/etc. can also be detrimental.
Balance is key.
Either way, you can't paint a brush on "all FPS" being 'bad'. Just like games in the same vein as Factorio can become very repetitive and require less thinking and more "Just put this block to this block" level of repetitiveness.
If we're talking "average person", I think the benefits are minimal. Some white collar jobs involve creativity but not all. Even jobs that do will not allow you to express that creativity in your early years as you follow whatever instructions your boss gives you.
they both involve thinking and planning and in-game knowledge and mastery to thrive in, but I don't think the benefits are really that comparable.
Where chess tests your prediction depth, if you will, fps tests your prediction breadth.
It is asking hundreds of thousands of engineers to practice leetcode for tech interviews, doing things that are inconsequential to the actual work.
Maybe slightly better than making candidates do chess puzzles or solve Rubik's Cubes though.
I'm "playing" the iNaturalist Seek app much like I played Pokémon Go (for a few weeks back then, anyway), except the content is more interesting and relevant (I now know so much more about familiar "background" plants) and there are sufficiently few hooks in the exercise to prevent me from compulsively spending a lot of money traveling around to photograph plants and animals.
Incidentally, this tendency of ours to catalog everything and pollute the world reminds me of the Judge in Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and with that in mind I make time to appreciate the life around me with minimal disturbance.
There's a gradient here of interactivity. Gilligan's Island was almost purely passive; broadcast television, albeit yes it was a social phenomenon we'd talk about at the office or with friends.
On the other end, there was this kind of idolized view that the online world was a receptacle for interactivity, that we could all be actively engaged. Oh, look at the wikipedia discourse around deciding what to do about the no-longer-a-planet Pluto. A mass of people deciding how to update the article. Wikipedia was a sink for engagement, and some of that was a productive use of human surplus. It idealized the tale, because so much wikipedia usage is passive, but even then: it's self directed, enriching. An available use of human capacity that seems so vastly much better than watching Gilligans Island.
In some ways, things like Factorio are much more like Gilligan's Island than using (activley or passively) Wikipedia. Are the same kind of broadcast programming. But I still think there's a kind of mental engagement here that's different, that's better than where we were. Clicking the mouse is engagement, if not productive engagement, in a way that's different to me from receivership. The brain may be doing useless loops, but it's still an active participant. Being sharp doesn't innately count for anything, but I think that allure of places to reward the brain for being sharp count for something, that they suggest the value & reward of using one's potential. And I think that keeps many from being dull, from rusting out into lower potentials. I think it encodes the positive value system of trying.
I think it's the most apt.