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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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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