I've spent several hundred hours playing this game and I think this game should be treated as an addictive drug. I know it's my own psychological problems but there's whole Reddit thread about how it ruined people's plans etc and wasted hundreds of hours of their lives. In contract, real "prohibited" substances like LSD, MDMA didn't make any negative impact on my life nor addiction. How is that?
I feel like all these additive games (especially one which uses psychological tricks like Skinner box) are some equivalent of brain exploits and should be treated with great caution. Maybe labeled somehow and have a reference where all these "exploits" and risk properly explained. Can anyone explain what tricks it uses to become so addictive?
Ironically I don't think there are any underhanded tricks in Factorio to make it more addictive. There are certainly no loot boxes or randomized rewards. What it does have is a series of tasks that escalate in complexity. Completing these tasks well gives a feeling of great satisfaction, and the result is a single enormous machine of your own individual design. If that's a bad thing, then we'll have to make engineering itself a controlled substance.
Yup, Factorio is addictive in the same way that reaching flow (the psychological state) is addictive. It's a game to experience the joy of problem solving.
You mean in the sense that programming can be addicting?
Factorio doesn't do the loot box stuff that F2P games are famous for. I think the best way to describe the game's addictiveness is that it's programming, but simpler, and gamified, with much more immediate emotional payoff.
The thing Factorio does do is that it evenly spaces out its achievement moments so that you get a steady stream of goals and accomplishing goals. That's what makes it so addictive: you feel like you're constantly overcoming challenges. And you are, but it's in a game and doesn't translate into real life.
It's definitely addicting. No denying that. I just think it Factorio does a good job of giving you enjoyment for the time you put into it rather than resorting to gambling mechanics like some games. (The list is rather long.)
In many ways. In Factorio, your factory can have concurrency, parallelism, race conditions, bottlenecks, deadlocks, resource starvation, etc, etc.
Looking for those types of problems and solving them is a very fun feedback loop. You can spend a few hours just walking around a large factory, making small incremental improvements as you go, and your entire factory will be visibly better off. The only thing preventing you from doing this to your application is the lack of visibility into the problems. There's a bottleneck in your code right now, but can you find it? They're almost never detectable by simple inspection of the source code, so it takes specialized tools. I would say then that building a large factory is like an optimal form of programming where nothing is opaque or hidden from you.
Since the game costs a straight $30 up front and has no in-app purchases, subscriptions, or ads, there’s really no incentive for the developers to use “tricks” to make it addictive. It’s just what I’d call an old-fashioned “good game.”
Plus the code is ROCK SOLID and always has been -- it hardly ever crashes. Yet it's like a pinball machine with 5 million balls in play, and still amazingly fast.
And starts reasonably quickly.
And runs really well on Linux, with no quirks or hicups.
(As someone who uses a Linux machine as the "primary" desktop, only switching to a Windows machine for games and other things that need it, I find it really nice to have a quick-to-launch game that runs perfectly on Linux.)
> Can anyone explain what tricks it uses to become so addictive?
Good game design.
In particular, I see a few broad strokes of good game design here:
* There are always a variety of tasks to accomplish of varying scope and complexity. If a player doesn't feel like adding on the next stage of the factory, they can perform other maintenance tasks like cleaning up local bottlenecks or aesthetic optimization (e.g. straightening out a section of the power network).
* Almost every single problem is directly caused by the player's own actions, through a logical chain of events that's obvious once the player becomes familiar with the game. Why is the widget facility starved for inputs? Because the player previously split off 3/4 of the bolts for other production. The resulting challenges (see the point above) become meaningful because of the history, giving the game a level of intrinsic motivation that is usually reserved for sim games like city builders.
* There's no single "right way" to win. Some players treat the game as a size/speed challenge, to produce the most stuff in the fastest time; others look towards the most efficient or compact layouts; still others are content to reach the basic "win" condition (launching a single rocket) with a bare minimum of facilities and a lot of patience. The game doesn't condescend to the player to explain at them that their playstyle is wrong.
* The game separates "doing something" and "doing something at scale," but it makes the player progress to the latter eventually. As a more concrete example, the player can build the first few science packs (progression tokens) in their inventory, Minecraft style, but they very quickly need to set up automation to produce the ever-increasing required number in a timely way. Over a typical game, the most central aspects of production will go through three or four wholesale renovations as the player designs around different bottlenecks. It's a kind of intrinsic progression that I've seen no other game replicate -- even if you had access to all the whiz-bang shinies at the start of the game, the fixed costs of using them would still push the player to a "starter base -> big base" progression.
In some ways, it might be better to treat Factorio not as a single game that is 'won' or 'lost' through arbitrary rules, but instead as a hobby. "I've spent several hundred hours playing with model trains" doesn't sound outlandish.
Will Wright has a great quote on game design that I can't find, but it's something like "What makes games fun is when the player has as many choices as possible, and all of them are good choices."
I think factorio succeeds in this well: there are always many things to do which will improve things, so you have to try to optimize which is is the best decision to advance furthest with a given amount of time.
This is an excellent answer. When you read their blog you realize that all those points have guided the current design of the game. There was multiple iteration of the tech tree to invite the player gently into the different "phases" of the game. (see https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-275).
They carefully thought about the name of things, the cost of things to communicate clearly to a new player what he is supposed to do next (manufacture new thing, ramp up the production of old thing, etc).
Yeah, when I went from copper and iron moving on belts to belts and inserters as items moving on belts I started to realize the rabbit hole was getting pretty deep.
People watch over a thousand hours of TV per year so if time spent was sufficient criteria for addiction we would be a pretty afflicted population. Think of how addicted I'd be to showering! I do it every day!
I would encourage you to be less hard on yourself. Think of a good game like a hobby. People play hundreds of hours of golf too and still find the time to lead productive lives.
Watching 100 hours of TV a year is probably not excessive. Watching 100 hours of TV a week would be unhealthy.
If there are people who lack self control such that playing games adversely affects their personal lives, then (without accusing the developer of malicious intent) something unhealthy has gone on.
I can't say I really agree with "x hours on entertainment like games is x hours wasted".
I think the comparison "it's more detrimental than illegal drugs" is thoughtless rhetoric. Maybe a better comparison could be 'empty calories'. -- I would agree I enjoyed playing Factorio more than I've enjoyed many other games, though.
Watching television for hours every day is at a minimum a bad idea and often an addiction. Many people would go crazy without a signal. Just look at how many people can't even function under COVID! As if being alone with your thoughts or with your family could ever be a problem for a healthy individual or family.
I'm curious actually, is uranium processing not deterministic? Does it not depend on the seed? Or is that seed only for the map and does it not influence other random events like biters and uranium?
The first multiplayer versions basically synchronised with each other and then ran independently, just executing the keyboard input from other players basically. No central server calling the shots. This was hell development-wise, but I think that concept hasn't changed too much actually: you may have a central server that tells your client whether you can really pick up an item from a chest or whether it's already gone, but the local simulation is still local (it's not as if there is an incoming video stream or stream of all entities that have moved; far from it, it's a handful of kilobytes per second). The random engines almost have to be synchronized as I never noticed more data traffic during biter attacks or such.
Of course it's still deterministic. It's a computer program, so it has to be deterministic. Multiplayer still uses a lockstep simulation, so all clients must compute the same random outcome.
But it does introduce an element of randomness that isn't present anywhere else in the game. Every other recipe in the game has fixed inputs and outputs with known ratios, and often very nice ratios. Put in two iron plates and get out a gear. Put in one copper plate and get out two copper wires.
The randomness in uranium processing is used to simulate the cascades of centrifuges used for isotope enrichment without having to track the enrichment of every single lump of uranium, and without having to introduce a hundred different types of uranium ore items. Instead you have a 0.7% chance of getting a lump of uranium-235 every time you process some uranium ore; the rest of the time you get uranium-238. 235 is used for fuel, 238 is used for ammo and for further enrichment.
It's clear what you meant, but I just wanted to touch on a nuance: Skinner boxes can be deterministic. "Skinner box" in the context of games generally just refers to the game design feeding you a steady drip of reward cycles.
>real "prohibited" substances like LSD, MDMA didn't make any negative impact on my life nor addiction.
I'm sure you are different (or at least think so yourself) but I have never heard anyone who use drugs that says otherwise before they have stopped using them completely. Also "ruined plans" versus "ruined lifes" is quite a difference. It cannot be a big surprise that someone who gets addicted to a game might also be a drug user. Addiction is not really about the drug itself but the person.
I watched the whole thing and still have no idea what Skinner boxes are beyond that it has something to do with making people want to push a proverbial button one more time. So how do you actually do that? What ways do games do this? They mentioned some loot drops but I never played a game with loot drops and so don't know what that means either. (The only gaming context I have for the word loot, aside from the dictionary definition, is loot boxes, a word which doesn't make any sense to me: what did you plunder to get that loot---other than your wallet, that is?)
Looking at Wikipedia instead, the Skinner Box page says about games:
> Slot machines and online games are sometimes cited as examples of human devices that use sophisticated operant schedules of reinforcement to reward repetitive actions.
So I guess it's just about wanting to play the game more because it's fun and it's not some magic method that game designers use to get more eyeballs for a not-so-fun game (the way that the linked video explained it)?
A Skinner box is just a feedback loop. You perform an action, and the game gives you some kind of information. Along the way people noticed that some types of information from the game make the player less likely to play again, and other types make the player more likely to play. Games which do well usually reward the user for playing the game. (There are also other criteria such as effective advertising, branding, celebrity, good engineering, and others that I'll ignore for the moment.)
An underhanded game will use this to reward you for actions which directly earn the developer more money. For example, imagine a hypothetical game where you find or earn powerups as you go along. These are both rewards and items that give you the opportunity for another reward. You enjoy using them because they allow you to make progress in the game, and because they are graphically and audibly satisfying to use. So far so good, but if you really want to make some money then you can introduce a way to buy more powerups. If the player is having some trouble with the level they're on, offer to let them buy a powerup that would help them. They'll get all the same reward feedback from obtaining and using the powerup as before, except you earned some extra money. If you want to really earn some money, all you have to do is make powerups rarer the further the user progresses in the game, and more and more necessary. The game can gradually change from a game of skill that rewards player skill to a game of money that rewards the player for giving up money.
Factorio, on the other hand, is a much, much better game than that. If you build a small assembly line that makes some items, the feedback you get is a visual display of the machine operating. When it's operating efficiently, raw materials stream in at speed from one side, and finished goods stream out at speed from the other. If you do the job less well, the effect is visually less satisfying. Perhaps the machines are idle part of the time, because they're not getting enough raw materials. Perhaps the items are not zipping past on the belts like you would want. Maybe the belt isn't quite full of material. Your first attempt succeeded, but only imperfectly. You can then revise your design to improve it, which is a very satisfying feedback loop indeed. The more you engage with this feedback loop, the more your skill at the game improves. The more your skill at the game improves, the better you can play the game. The skill ceiling is really quite high, and building an exceptional factory requires a lot of advance planning and forethought as well as the optimization and debugging skills you have gained from your earlier play.
Either way it's just a game. Many people say that playing games is always a waste of time, because you gain nothing from it. That's not really true. You can gain satisfaction, excitement, catharsis, knowledge, understanding, relaxation, friendship, and so on from games. It's just that some games give you those in exchange for your time invested, and others give you that for your time invested plus a continuous stream of cash purchases.
I've spent several hundred hours playing this game and I think this game should be treated as an addictive drug. I know it's my own psychological problems but there's whole Reddit thread about how it ruined people's plans etc and wasted hundreds of hours of their lives. In contract, real "prohibited" substances like LSD, MDMA didn't make any negative impact on my life nor addiction. How is that?
I feel like all these additive games (especially one which uses psychological tricks like Skinner box) are some equivalent of brain exploits and should be treated with great caution. Maybe labeled somehow and have a reference where all these "exploits" and risk properly explained. Can anyone explain what tricks it uses to become so addictive?