AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE

Exploring the rise of the factory sim genre – and what it says about automation in our own lives

- Edwin Evans-ThirlwEll

At first, it’s a single drill, rumbling away cheerfully in an alien world of sunny hills and wildflowers. Then, your first conveyor belt, carrying ore from mines to the smelter. The factory grows up around you slowly and unobtrusively: it’s easy to lose sight of the whole while you’re busy untangling bottlenecks and reorganising your production lines in order to create more advanced components. But after a while, you think to look up and around rather than down from your observation tower, and realise that, at some point, the factory has become everything you can see.

So go the opening hours of Satisfactory, one of the most successful members of an intricate species of management game that has quietly shot to popularity over the past few years. Ranging in scale from molecular reactors to extractors bigger than stars, factory sims are hypnotic celebrations of automation, allowing a single player to build up an industrial empire that can ultimately be left to operate itself. But it’s once again worth looking up, from the mesmerising loop and around yourself, and considering these games’ complicated relationship both with the social and environmental impacts of their real-life equivalents, and with videogames’ own tendency towards optimisation.

If the factory sim genre has a patient zero, that game is Wube Software’s Factorio, launched in 2016, which casts you as a stranded astronaut gradually industrialising an entire planet in order to build a rocket and escape. In essence, it’s Command & Conquer meets Elon Musk. “Factorio was the main inspiration for our game,” acknowledges Mark Hofma,