Factorio is a successful game by many different standards. As an indie game made by a small studio, it has been widely received well and is a great example of a game making a relatively boring subject addicting and even thought-provoking. At the core, Factorio is a game about building factories. Using three basic resources (coal, copper, and iron ore), nearly everything a player needs can be built. First you shovel coal into furnaces to create plates of metal. Then you use these plates to build automatic assembly machines. These machines can create any item in the game and are required to make science packs to unlock more complex machines for power generation, defense, and logistical design. As you progress and your factory grows, the wildlife surrounding you continuously sends waves of enemies to besiege your base. To respond, you must raise walls, turrets, and even tanks and artillery. There is never a dull moment in Factorio.
Beyond the game’s incredible addictiveness lies the fascinating habits you develop as you play, and their perhaps unintended commentary. The story begins after you alone survive a spaceship crash-landing on an alien world. You are small, utterly alone, and equipped only with an axe and headlamp. As your factory begins to take shape: boiling water for power, long assembly lines of science packs, and perhaps even flying drones to transport materials, the pollution it creates also forms a large cloud. Extending outwards, it reaches small nests of alien natives who, unless you wander directly into, do not attack. Once they smell pollution, they muster a force to destroy the source, and as the game progresses these waves grow larger, stronger, and more frequent. As I played the game, I began to realize that my attitude towards these creatures had become alarmingly hostile. I had crashed on this planet, and in order to leave I began plundering its natural resources, spewing pollution, and murdering the original natives. The scariest aspect is this was all done without a second thought, and there is no alternative in Factorio. In fact, even building solar panels to reduce pollution takes so much space you have to exterminate nests just to clear room. This game’s design involved me a virtual space-colonialism I hadn’t even realized existed.
Another destructive mindset that emerges from playing Factorio is a disregard for the environment and the use of the planet’s natural resources. Forests appear alongside large deposits of ore when you first enter the game. These trees provide wood when chopped down, absorb a small amount of pollution, and prevent anything from being built on their space. Any item that is constructed with wood (wood chests, basic power poles) is later replaced by researching a version that is made without wood and functionally superior in every way. These trees can only absorb a tiny amount of pollution, and once the cloud spreads far enough, forests you see for the first time will already be rotten, black, and leaf-less. Trees also cannot be replanted and block movement (other than the slow tank vehicle which can move straight through them destructively), meaning after only a short amount of time into a game of Factorio, trees are only a nuisance. They can be easily destroy by chopping, burning, being run over, or assigning drones to clear them. Trees quickly become simply another obstacle preventing you from expanding your massive factory and therefore must be destroyed, and in Factorio, destroying them has no consequence at all.
The final objective of Factorio is to build another spaceship to ferry you back into space and away from the planet of your factory. Reaching the end is exciting: watching all your hard work collected into the rocket finally achieve a definite end. But as you propel away from the planet, what have you left behind? A nearly completely self-sufficient factory, surrounded by concrete and steel walls, firing bullets onto the remaining natives of a world with few natural resources left and barely any forested land. Factorio is not only a simulation of a factory-building adventure, but also a virtual colonialism and capitalism simulator. You expand unceasingly onto land that is not yours, utilizing any resources that you can find without regard to preservation. On the backs of native corpses, you have built a self-perpetuating machine, chewing through resources to produce copious amounts of items you will likely never need or use, but feel the need to create nonetheless. Even once the creator has left this world, your artifacts and systems remain, punishing the future native descendants until an unknown time. Sure Factorio is a blast to play, but maybe it’s just a little bit too real?
Under the assumption that it was the goal of the developers for the game to communicate the negative effects of unregulated industrialization and colonialism, why do you think they chose to make the game about a stranded astronaut trying to get home? Companies that build huge polluting factories in real life mostly do it out of greed for more money. Comparatively, while there is a strong moral argument that the protagonist of Factorio should not build a spaceship if the cost to the planet is so high, he is a sympathetic character. Additionally, nothing like the game's story happens in real life. There are, as far I can think of, no situations where an individual ends up in a difficult…