There was a funny but insightful take about how Factorio is about a colonizing force going to a planet and taking all of it's natural resources while suppressing all the native inhabitants and how the player identifies with this evil entity as if a good thing.
If I recall correctly, the game does somewhat try to dodge that by having the player crash-land on the planet. Everything they do is, theoretically, in service of building a rocket to get off-planet again.
...now, do players go wildly beyond achieving that victory condition in ways that play into the colonial-exploitation vibe? Perhaps.
Eh, is it really "dodging that"? If an alien landed on our planet, took over our resources, filled our air with mutating pollution, and shot at us anytime we tried to take them back, we wouldn't give them a pass just because they were trying to leave :D
I always kind of embraced the idea of being the bad guy in this game. I find the ease with which I (and others) just kind of shrug it off intersting.
A more stark example would be the movie Starship Troopers: superficially, you might feel like the "bugs" are the bad guys, but take a step back and you realize that the humans are the ones attacking them.
I think the implied intent of the player character counts for a lot when it comes to colonialist vibes. "Oops, I didn't mean to be here, and my main goal is to leave" is a step away from any sort of colonial undertaking.
As for accepting it, I'd imagine it's because the game doesn't really give you a choice. There isn't a way to coexist with the native species -- they're always aggressive even if you don't create pollution (they're just not drawn to you without pollution; they'll always attack if they see you). In your metaphor, it'd be like if we never did anything but shoot at the alien. So you can either just not play the game at all, or you can exist in conflict with the native species.
It'd make it a very different game, but it'd be interesting to imagine there being some way to work with the native species. If you could make the choice between a quick and dirty pollution-heavy resource-extraction "bad path" and a more complex social cooperation "good path", that'd probably trigger you feeling guiltier about casual extermination.
To spoil Ender's Game a bit: the bugs were initially hostile, in a very "we genuinely don't understand non-hive species" way such that they were intensely horrified when they realized that all the people they killed were individuals. They were then purely on the defensive as humanity launched the second war.
In Starship Troopers (this varies between the book and the movie), as I recall, the bugs are more or less a peer species to humanity. They're engaged in territorial struggle, which escalates to war. (The movie version engenders a lot of debate over whether the inciting incident of the war was a false flag by the earth government.)
When I played the game, it seemed pretty obvious that the main character is evil, in a literary sense. There's no redeeming qualities like in other games like Uncharted. It's just one person who most likely accidentally landed on a planet and solves that self-imposed problem with violence. The fact that the bugs attack depending on pollution confirms it.
The main character is supposed to die to protect the presumably low intelligence animals? He doesn't want to be there and he's trying to leave, and doing what he has to do to leave it. That's not a self-imposed problem.
Also, is this planet like ten square miles large or something? How much damage is the character doing to the planet as a whole? We all willingly pollute our own planet in a much more severe way to do nothing more than make our own lives a little more comfortable, and I don't think that makes us evil, either. Short-sighted, maybe.
The map is technically 4 million square kilometers but in design/narrative terms, it's planet-sized.
The character is not supposed to die, they're supposed to be evil. The point of the game is that winning the game is evil. It's not saying humans on earth are evil, it's suggesting that maybe they are, or maybe we're the bugs, or maybe some of us are the bugs and some of us are the engineer. We also don't know the intelligence level of the bugs. They're smart enough to coordinate attacks, pathfind, target polluting and military buildings, and sense pollution, but it's purposely ambiguous.
I also find it rather obvious to the point I consider the game a masterpiece in satire, in a very dark and twisted way. I think it's the most cynical game I have ever played and I love it for that
Factorio's visuals support that take. I feel bad when the trees next to my coal power plant go brown and then die, and the initially beautiful blue lake next to the spawn point turns into a disgusting brown-green. In the later game, dropping nuclear bombs on the aliens leave permanent marks on the map, always reminding you of your crimes when you build more factory on the scorched earth.
There's a space mod that has you jumping to different planets and allows you to ship things between them on rockets (or, more hilariously, effectively shooting them between planets). Definitely seals that vibe.
That same mod also uses a tech tree mod that actually makes the burner phase slower, so you pollute more in the beginning to boot.
I have always had that take with Factorio and thought it was sublime like the rest of the game. It resonates with modern life for me, the factory must always grow (growth mindset) at the expense of everything else, all this wonderful automation building better technology while ruining the natural environment, remaking it into something else.
I love the game and I usually like to play by minimizing my pollution cloud (rushing solar and nuclear) and trying to avoid the natives as much as possible trying to be "good" but still survive, but in the end you still must make a factory and eventually piss off and kill natives, ultimately its you or them, I know I am the monster not them.
In real life, we perceive colonisation as something bad because we have empathy to other humans — which is something we don't really have no control over, as hundreds of years of human evolution have made us this way.
But as creatures in Factorio don't have triggers that force us to feel empathy for them, what objective reasons do we have to take their side over a protagonist, who is clearly human? The only reasons I can think of are violations of private property — which the monsters don't see to actually claim — and non-aggression principle, which they usually break first, giving the protagonist the right to defend himself.
The monsters only attack after their land is polluted:
> Pollution attracts biters to the Player's factory. Biters who find themselves in a polluted area will attempt to reach the source of pollution and destroy it.
There's also the expansion groups, which will periodically move around to create new nests. Even if you don't walk at all, you will be found and attacked sooner or later.
Not “regrettably”. Any value judgement about our human nature that drives our vale judgements is inherently a circular logic problem, and thus, meaningless.
