| HN Mirror

> I'm pretty sure plenty of people addicted to MMORPGs don't forget leveling up their character

I've been this person - I spent almost two years playing Everquest to the detriment of my own goals and wellbeing.

MMOs are a special class of hazard in that area, IMO. I feel like I'm particularly apt to getting "sucked into" games, there is always a point where it becomes significantly less fun and I lose interest. In most games that's around 20-50 hours. For "good" games, it's around 200 hours. For MMOs... I don't know because I've never found it. With EQ I only stopped playing because my PC finally died and I couldn't afford to replace it (because I couldn't hold down a job). With others I stopped because I saw the feedback loop had begun that would lead to that sort of issue and forced myself to do so.

> "Play Factorio, it has benefits for you that help you be productive" in response to someone dealing with procrastination? If that isn't absurd, I don't know what is.

I totally understand and respect your point here, but I didn't come to the article through the series. As a result, I didn't make any connections to trying to see Factorio as a tool to combat procrastination.

Instead, I saw the article as advocating Factorio as a means of developing your problem-solving skills. For that purpose... honestly, it's pretty good. The article makes a good case for this and my own experience aligns with it.

I would have no issues encouraging my daughters to play Factorio (or similar games like Satisfactory), because I believe there are important skills that can be learned there. Like most things, the Pareto Principle applies: you're going to learn a lot more on your first playthrough than your forty-second. Even so... as a software engineer, I see many parallels in building and maintaining complex systems in the real world that can be drawn from the game.

For example - and I'm playing Satisfactory these days, so the items come from that, not Factorio - in the early game you need a ton of iron plates and iron rods. Mid-game you need reinforced iron plates, screws, and modular frames, all of which are made from iron plates and iron rods. Even though you know you'll shortly need several multiples of the number of iron plates and rods that you need in the beginning, it doesn't make sense to build a massive factory to create them in bulk yet. Doing so means that it takes you longer to get through the early game, and invariably your needs change as you progress: maybe you need fewer iron plates and rods than you thought; maybe you need more; maybe you need them halfway across the map. You just don't know enough in the early game to accurately predict what you're going to need and where.

This has strong corollaries with software engineering, both within a single application and when building more complex systems. It's almost always better to build the minimal structures necessary to deliver what you need at the time. There are a few cases where it makes sense to optimize early, but those cases all require experience in building the thing you're working on and the burden of early optimization is much more difficult to justify than it may seem.