In Factorio, from the Czech developer Wube Software, you have crash-landed on an alien planet and your task is to build a rocket so you can escape. This entails single-handedly restaging the Industrial Revolution, from breaking up rocks for crude stone furnaces to refining oil into rocket fuel. One recent Sunday, I had just installed a pump on a lake shore to feed water to my concrete plant, when it occurred to me that I hadn’t drunk any real-world water in several hours. My head was aching, but I didn’t want to get up from my computer. I wanted to solve the problem with a click of a mouse, the way I would in the game, running a few metres of pipe from the kitchen tap to my hunched form (and perhaps another few metres of pipe from my hunched form to the toilet).
I’ve been sucked into plenty of games before, but few have so completely disabled my conscious will, my sense of time, indeed any region of my brain that isn’t devoted to growing the factory. Yet, by Factorio standards, I’m a mere dabbler. Two friends of mine once played a 24-hour session together with only a three-hour nap break in the middle. It’s not uncommon for serious players to have logged several thousand hours in total.
The game, which has sold about four million copies over the past eight years, and released its first expansion pack last week, has been nicknamed Cracktorio for its addictiveness. What makes this all the more remarkable is that Factorio makes so little effort to seduce you. It’s a dour and fiddly experience, with graphics that look 20 years old, where taking a shortcut is always punished down the line and in which, if you want to excel, you will spend at least part of your time calculating ratios.