Oktokolo wrote: Wed Aug 14, 2019 10:28 pm
eradicator wrote: Wed Aug 14, 2019 3:35 pm
TIL massacaring hordes of biters isn't "explicit" violence.
It is as much violence as is the common spring-cleaning.
I think Factorio is even more violent than chess! "What, chess? But chess isn't a violent game at all!", I hear you say. But, yes, it is, if you really think about it: It's about two kings who send out their armies against each other to duke it out (for whatever reason), and the game usually ends with the death (or surrender) of one of them. Sometimes the whole army goes down before the king dies, sometimes one player can defeat the other by cleverly sneaking through the enemy lines and "assassinating" just the other king. Oh, and sacrificing just about every unit you have -- from "cheap" pawns to the mighty queen -- in order to win the battle is an essential part of the game.
Usually, a game of chess doesn't look really violent, the players are rather calm, taking their time before making a move. Also, apart from implementations like Battle Chess (it's about 30 years ago that it was released!) there hardly is any violence at the surface, you won't see a drop of blood. It's very abstract, one can use an expensive set of highly polished chess pieces, or you could even play with a primitive set crafted from anything available (thinking here of
The Grünstein variant, where prisoners make their chess pieces from bread crumbs). Nevertheless, digging down to the core, it's actually a game about mass destruction and extinction.
Factorio is on the same level, or goes even beyond chess: You can go out exterminating biters, take out their nests with your SMG, your flame thrower or rocket launcher, steamroll them with your tank, and later nuke them into the ground, if you like to get your hands dirty. But in the end, you will only be successful if you don't deal with individual biters but consider biter extermination as a necessary problem: a problem that can be solved by perfecting logistics and continuously scaling up. I don't want to invoke Goodwin's law, so I won't even mention Nazi death camps; but do you remember the Cold War, where reportedly the strategists in spotless uniforms or suits would calculate with the unit of mega deaths? Same thing: a masterpiece of heartless perfection, very advanced science and technology applied on a very abstract level to effectively take out humans globally by not even considering them as humans but reducing them to mere numbers, to a mere logistic or technological problem. So, Factorio is not only a violent game, it's ultraviolent.
Factorio is a logistics puzzle game spiced up with some tower-defense, arcade and tycoon game elements teaching the basic principles of pest control without becoming one of these boring educational games... and it has trains (no bridges or tunnels though).
Correct, and I like the game a lot for all these puzzles. Am I a hypocrite? I don't think so. I wouldn't want to be that engineer on Nauvis in reality, yet I have a lot of fun with all the puzzles. But Factorio is just a game! When I play it, I am that engineer stranded on Nauvis -- but that's just a game character, and I can distinguish between game and reality. I've also read many a crime novel where somebody is murdered every couple of pages, and I can also sympathize and identify with evil protagonists -- yet I've never gone out shooting people left and right of me. It is only a paper moon, hanging over a cardboard sea; like theater: After the play is over, the actors change back into their regular clothes and live their regular lives. They have impersonated their character just on stage, but they
are not that character.
Then again, I'm quite a bit older than 13 years. It may well be that a teenage kid will be more drawn into the mire than I. So may be that 13 years old kid all this thread is about should start out playing peaceful mode, where the game is only about building stuff (though at the cost of permanently changing/damaging the in-game environment). Factorio is a very rewarding game that makes you think creatively and motivates you to play around with lots of toys and learn something new each time. Trains, combinators, thinking of perfect ratios when building production lines; devoting time and energy to minor details while not losing track of the big picture -- all of these are wonderful traits and kids should be encouraged to experience this. But it would be good if there was some parental guidance (that's not about prohibition, but about reflection!), perhaps even parents playing together with their kids, reminding them of the moral implications of what they enact in game and making sure their kids don't get cold-blooded perfectionists, that they don't lose sight of the fact that there is a real world outside of the game: A world with real people that should be treated as individuals, not as numbers, with all due respect.
