It was rather difficult to understand the point of this essay. It doesn’t state its thesis until about the middle. The first half is a philosophical review of automation games, taking a detour to explain what the word automation could mean (why?) to eventually arrive at the conclusion that tech bros (incorrectly associating them with Silicon Valley, which is focused on hardware, not software) are bad. The reasoning for which seems to be largely an opinion stated as fact with the supporting evidence being that these games are unrealistic.
I found it difficult to engage with these ideas because the linkage between them is so incredibly stretched that it is hard to see the connection at all.
Automation games are a relatively recent development in gaming. Published in 2015, Infinifactory can be considered the first game of the genre. Just one year later, Factorio entered early access, soon to become the most known and successful automation game to date.
Impressive how little homework they did. Article starts off the very first sentence with a whopper. Factorio was available (and already going viral) way before hitting steam EA, which back then was the Greenlight program and way tougher to get into than today’s EA. It predated Infinifactory by over a year. I hope they put more effort into research for the rest of their weird philosophical article, but I wouldn’t count on it.
When the article was first posted it said "Published in 2025…”, at least they corrected that heh. But yeah factorio had been around for a couple of years by then.
reincantamentox.substack.com
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