Goods are produced, transformed and consumed. The factory simulation is a mathematical model, a function over time.

Factorio features environmental storytelling in the sense that it tells about the natural environment and how human interacts with it. When game designers do this on purpose, it is called environmental storytelling. There is, however, a story being told casually. But it’s not the end of the technology tree, you can continue playing the game. (It is not that the engineer wants to be rescued.) You “win” the game by launching the satellite. There is a thin story, but it can be summarized in one sentence: The player avatar, simply called engineer, crash-lands on an alien planet and needs to build a rocket to launch a satellite into orbit. Third, on its surface, the game does not tell anything. Today, as the climate crisis, the Anthropocene extinction and plastic pollution are among the most pressing problems of humankind, we are reminded of these essential “services”. For lack of a better description, science uses an economic term: nature provides “ecosystem services”, like drinking water, breathable air, fertile soil, renewable resources, decomposition of poisonous substances etc. Clearly, humans depend on and are entangled with the nature around them. A species cannot survive for long if it is not part of biogeochemical cycles and energy flows.įrom a human perspective, ecology could mean exchange of matter between human and nature. Substances are transformed in food webs, but matter and energy is never lost.

In ecology, there are few one-way streets. They transform matter in biochemical processes. Such organisms span from microbes to animals, including humans. Second, the game is not about ecology, broadly defined as “relationship of organisms with each other and the environment”. There are technical, societal and juridical conditions. Products are sold on a market, exchanged as commodities. In the capitalist mode of production, someone owns the means of production, employs workers, pays wages and earns profit in order to reinvest it.

There is demand on the consumer side and supply on the producer side. In an economy, there are humans and human labor transforming natural substances. It is surprising what the game omits, what the game does not tell.įirst, the game is not about building an economy. Instead of asking what the game is about, it gives more insight to ask what Factorio is not about. The goal of the game is to automate the production further and produce more complex artifacts.

More machines transform products into other products, and so forth. The factory uses machines to mine raw materials and process them. On its surface, Factorio is a simulation of a factory. I find it noteworthy how Factorio depicts the natural world and human interaction with it. It is worth examining what games tell about the world – and what not. Every game tells you something about the world – the in-game fictional world but also the world their creators and players inhabit. As video games gained in depth and complexity in the last decade, video game criticism started taking them seriously as cultural and artistic works, as a diverse medium. While it is still in the early access phase and scheduled to be released in August, more than two million copies of the game have been sold. The video game Factorio got me hooked and I have played it longer than any other single-player game.

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