I'll go on a bit of a tangent and say that I don't play Factorio for the same reason that I keep coding.
The gameplay gives you creative choices and sets of rules, and a satisfaction of working within those rules to get things going by reflecting your head inside it, much like programming.
I bounced off of it after a few short hours, with a deep sense of lost time. If what I do in the game is the same I would do for work or as side projects, then why am I choosing the game, which has no outcome in the real world?
I went back to my side project, and never played Factorio again.
I read on HN a month or two ago that burnout is associated with repeat large scale failures, and the way to recover from burnout is to have repeat small scale success.
Games, such as factorio, can provide you with the small scale successes relatively risk free, allowing you to recover from burnout.
If you consider this from the functional perspective, then it becomes yet another useful tool to the developer.
"Games, such as factorio, can provide you with the small scale successes relatively risk free, allowing you to recover from burnout"
True. But they can also provide you with cheap instant "successes" which a depressed person continues to go for, instead of seeking success in the real world.
The difference is that factorio is artificial, so it can cultivate that flow feeling perfectly. If that’s what you seek, then factorio will give it to you.
A side project may well give you that some of the time, but will also involve tasks that don’t give you that.
In other words, factorio is a game! They rigorously exclude more realistic features if they believe they'll make the game less fun. You can't do that in real life! When I play it, I feel like I'm working on a side project in that peak phase where you're fleshing it out and what you have in your brain is appearing in front of you. As another commenter said, it helps you recover from the constant stumbling blocks and blockers that burn you out during real development.
When I had a job change last winter that had me not programming (I build automation solutions around business processes) for about 4 months, I was rather frustrated with the constant planning and strategy meetings. I tried to get into a side programing project, but couldn't really settle into one. That's when I saw/remembered Factorio and started on it. It scratched that itch and I spent hours playing the game.
Once my job got back into more hands-on programming, I quickly lost interest in playing Factorio. I've been reading other programmers having the same feeling. You expend the same type of mental processing with both, so one makes you too tired to do the other.
That said, if I have a long weekend or a week off, I might find some time and enjoy playing it, and still feel refreshed when returning to work.
This is exactly why I can't enjoy "puzzle games" like The Witness, Antichamber, or even Sudoku, et al. Why would I want to solve puzzles with known answers that thousands of people have already solved? The puzzles may look cool or have interesting mechanics, but the answers are already set in stone. Nothing novel or emergent can happen. I already solve problems all day long for work. I don't want to solve arbitrary ones in my free time. Just my personal mindset. I do enjoy most other types of games.
> Why would I want to solve puzzles with known answers that thousands of people have already solved?
For the same reasons you might engage in any entertainment activity.
Real-life still-unsolved puzzles are hard ; whereas puzzle games keep the difficulty under some control (except for the infamous boat puzzle in The Witness).
Real-life problems are hard because, often, proper domain modeling/formalization is part of the problem. Puzzle games generally don't have this 'domain modeling' part, they provide you with an extremely consistent set of rules, and you have to build a solution inside it. Sometimes this set of rules is partly implicit, and discovering it is part of the fun (e.g The Witness, Antichamber) ; but you never have to worry about the real-world and it's complexity.
When I played Baba is You, solving a puzzle didn't feel like fixing a problem. It felt more like the instant you finally get a joke, or come up with a good punchline yourself. The mechanics of the puzzle game combine in surprising and entertaining ways, and the puzzle designer sets up the situation to force you to experience the same thing they felt when they found that combination.
Not every puzzle game has mechanics that combine in such surprising and entertaining ways so consistently, but I think this feeling is what most of them are going for.
This is the reason I almost can't enjoy any single player, story-driven game or puzzle game. These days I only play multiplayer, online games because even if we're all playing the same game, every experience and interaction is something new. People are unpredictable and they keep things interesting.
The one type of single player game I do play are either city building games or 4X games. The freedom for creativity and randomness, respectively, makes every game new.
I actually don't watch many movies or much television for that reason. I still find books enjoyable, though. I think there's something different about needing to visualize everything yourself that still allows for creativity.
I find the same with TV/movies vs books and I don't really watch many TV shows or movies for that reason, but I find games different because they're interactive: because I have an impact on the story (at least in the story games I tend to play), so the outcome is so much more personal and impactfull than a movie can be.
I do think you're on to something in that having to visualise everything yourself when reading books does get me more invested, probably because I can better project onto the characters than if they're just given to me on a screen.
I recently played an interactive visual novel (think choose your own adventure only digital) and.. wow, it was not as I expected. By the time shit went down, I was already so invested in the characters that by the time shit hit the fan, I actually legitimately cared about what happened in a way that no movie or show ever has and only a few books and games have.
How do you feel about the highly interactive "all of your choices will impact the story" games, where few people will experience exactly the same thing you did? For example, Detroit: Become Human or Until Dawn, where any or all of the main characters can die without the story ending (quite early on in some cases too; but they can also survive), or the Life Is Strange games?
I had a similar experience, I loved it, I had a great 20 odd hours several years ago, but experienced the realisation that the greater ‘game’ out there was a better use time and have not gone back (compared to civ or stellaris, or prison architect, which I give 10 hours to a couple times a year)
The game is great, I just can’t spend that much time... psychologically... repeating the same motion ad infinitum
I feel like the game cultivates all sorts of wisdom regarding supply-chain logistics, monitoring, project management, task prioritization, queueing theory, and just general engineering problem-solving.
It’s like how budding Chinese military leaders were once (still?) encouraged to play Go. It shapes your mind and develops patterns that will later prove applicable to real-world situations.
Same story with SpaceChem for me. I played it for the first time a couple of months ago. Played for an hour. Spent most of the time optimising, beat all my friends' scores, quit and vowed never to touch it again.
That's why I stopped playing Dota. I don't to be a middle school teacher. If I'd want that I'd focus more on going into management and get better pay along the way.
I'll go on a bit of a tangent and say that I don't play Factorio for the same reason that I keep coding.
The gameplay gives you creative choices and sets of rules, and a satisfaction of working within those rules to get things going by reflecting your head inside it, much like programming.
I bounced off of it after a few short hours, with a deep sense of lost time. If what I do in the game is the same I would do for work or as side projects, then why am I choosing the game, which has no outcome in the real world?
I went back to my side project, and never played Factorio again.