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On The Revolutionary Potential of Automation Games
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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Both celebrate industrialization and the exploitation of the natural world as heroic undertakings without any regard to the value of nature.
Knowing what I know today about the environmental destruction caused by industry (up to and including the global climate crisis), I have decided to skip these games. Even though the core gameplay loop of management & expansion very much appeals to me.
Thinking of checking out Terra Nil. Has anyone here played that?
They really don't. Satisfactory, as has been explained already, is more direct, however Factorio isn't glorifying itself either if you look even half a Millimeter below the surface.
Have you ever listened to the soundtrack for instance? It is not grand or glorious, especially on Nauvis it mostly sounds slightly ominous. Also the way factories develop, intentionally or not, often resembles the way cancer spreads. And of course enemies attack you because of pollution and the plants around you die because of it. That even harms you because that means more pollution going towards enemies.
It doesn't have a Glados inspired voice constantly making fun of you and telling you to be a good corporate doggy, but it absolutely doesn't display itself as heroic in any way.
Additionally, even using exclusively solar power as soon as possible doesn't really stop pollution from spreading, it just reduces the rate of growth, which is good but it's also a pretty clear statement that industry in itself is something that needs to be taken as a tradeoff, not an inherent good.
In Factorio 2 (yeah sure, Space Age is "just a DLC", right), the final armor is basically a coffin. The dev diaries explicitly state their intention on it. They also explicitly say that the protagonist is not the 'good guy', for that matter.
I wasn't sure whether the term heroic would adequately fit both games but if you think about it, you're still achieving things by pushing your industry in Factorio. The only thing that the tongue-in-cheek commentary adds is some ludo-narrative dissonance. Expansion, technological progress, and conquest are still your main goals as a player.
To be clear, I deliberately did not address my critique to players but the games themselves. If you're having fun, that's great. But I still think it's not for me.
(FWIW these doubts started forming in my mind as I was playing the otherwise excellent Anno 1800, where ever-happy brown-skinned people gladly support you in replacing their lush forests with belching smokestacks.)
they are your goals but you're quite obviously doing it at the expense of the natural world. the planet slowly corrupts as the factory grows; the trees start growing twisted and ugly and eventually die, the grass turns from green to yellow to red, to bare dirt, and the oceans slowly go from a crystalline blue, to a muddy green, and finally to a dark brown. thats not ludonarrative dissonance, that's showing you the consequences of your actions.
Not all media has to have the protagonist or player character be a good person.
Of course it depends on how it's portrayed, if for example American Psycho actually was written the way a lot of idiots seem to think it was, glorifying Patrick Bateman's actions and showing him as "cool", that'd be a different story from how it actually exists. In that case the book would be significantly more problematic. Considering your Anno 1800 example, I am unfamiliar with the game, so I can not tell you how things are portrayed there, but overall you definitely need to see the nuance between showing someone doing a bad thing and actually promoting said bad thing.
Also it's totally fine if that's not for you and you prefer media with a heroic protagonist, everyone has their own tastes, but
is blatantly false
The satire in satisfactory is both pretty on the nose while also quite subtle of you look a little deeper. Only the most cursory glance at the game would make you think it glorifies the destruction by industrial expansion.
The factory must grow turns into starship troopers base defense real fucking quick. The artillery train will turn all into soup, the factory must grow.
Not really much to spoil, but just incase anyone cares: spoilers.
Haven't played Factorio, but Satisfactory is definitely NOT presented as your character being heroic or glorious. Your character is constantly berated for being too slow to meet expectations, too stupid to understand what's going on around them, and basically just constantly being treated as a tool. There is a 'save humanity' angle but it's floated as pretty obvious bullshit to try to milk a bit of motivation out of your character that's basically a slave whose interests the company doesn't give a single fuck about, by hitting you with over the top messages like "Remember all of Earth is counting on you, to include millions of kittens and/or puppies." Even when attacked by hostile wildlife, the indicator that you're taking hits doesn't even say YOU are taking hits, but makes a little popup notifying you of something akin to 'unauthorized damage to company property detected' lol.
I took it as being critical of that hyper-corporatism by depicting it as cranked up to a comical level.
They even slipped in some real world politics by unlocking the "Cyberwagon" in response to doing something stupid in game. It's a Cybertruck, which is stupid-expensive in game, has only a single inventory slot, handles like shit, has broken windows, and my favorite jab: is literally only capable of turning right. So, if you wanted a good indicator for where the devs' heads are at, there ya go.
I'd definitely recommend it.
Buy it, it's a fun little game. But gameplay wise it has absolutely nothing to do with management and expansion. The game's description itself is actually pretty poor. It's mostly a puzzle game, where the correct order of steps matters a lot.
No, the game is really just pure, uncut heroin for engineering nerds. It’s designed to appeal to their deep desires for automation, clever designs, and optimization.
Those people don’t really care about economics, they care about creating little engines that process one type of resource into another.
I don't know.... saying that satisfactory celebrates industrialization is a stretch. The 'glory' of the robotic she-voice is so tongue in cheek that I don't see how anyone could miss it, like when they mention that reflecting on potential causes of death is discouraged per your contract.
Terra Nil is great. Very different vibe mechanically, but I found it a refreshing change of pace from the implicitly imperialist and explicitly industrialist tone of many games
You can do things in games which you should absolutly not do in RL..
Go for it. play these amazing games!
Its only these who cant differenciate between real and virtual who will judge you for playing it.
You do you. If a theme of industrial growth just doesn't fit with what you can enjoy, it's no one's business to say you're wrong for that.
That being said, if the game otherwise appeals to you it might be worth checking out the demo to validate your feelings, at least regarding factorio. There just really isn't anything else out there like it, so it's worth it to be sure.
I've heard shapez2 does a decent job coming close to it, and I think it's just an infinite abstract plane of shapes and color.
i agree tbh, basically the whole sandbox resource production game genre is rife with colonial ideology
but thank you for mentioning Terra Nil, that looks neat! i need to look into that
Sounds like Eco may be for you. It’s definitely not the same management and production chain thing but some of that, and I ended up liking it more than I expected