Automation games are a relatively recent development in gaming. Published in 2025 [typo, 2015], Infinifactory can be considered the first game of the genre.
The genre might be a bit older, depending on how you define it. If the sole factor to be considered is that you don’t “do” things by your own, you create contraptions to do them for you, then The Codex of Alchemical Engineering (2008, also from Zach) would be perhaps the first game in the genre.
However, The Codex is missing the “grow!” aspect that you see in typical games within the genre. It’s already in other games (like Progress Quest, from 2002), but never coupled with the contraptions part.
The sole response to indigenous claims presented in the game is essentially violence and they are the evil while the player is the hero. Automation games are Frantz Fanon 101: the colonizer demonizing the colonized. It’s impossible to tell if the game is a criticism of Industrial Colonialism or yet another emanation of Western society’s zeitgeist.
I think that there are plenty grounds to analyse Factorio’s discourse on ecological matters, but associating biters with “the colonised” is IMO silly. They’re depicted as non-sentient animals reacting to your pollution.
And I feel like the role of the player - as a hero or as protagonist villain - is ambiguous, without a single “right” answer.
depicted as non-sentient animals
Have you ever read accounts of debates on the topic of native americans actually having a soul or not? Because on that ground a lot of brutalities were committed, until the church actually decided that they actually had a soul. The criticism of intellectual faculties of the colonized and their reduction to animals is an integral part of several colonial processes.
Have you ever read accounts of debates on the topic of native americans actually having a soul or not?
I did read those. However I honestly do not think that Factorio associates biters (and spitters) with Amerindians, or any other group of people. Biters are clearly represented as insects, at most crustaceans; including colourful haemolymph, nests, and physical castes.
So for me the association sounds extremely assumptive; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. At least for Factorio; I do not know how much this applies to the genre as a whole.
Instead, if there is any sort of discourse being conveyed by the player fighting biters there (be it glorifying it or criticising it), it’s ecological in nature, not social. Ockham’s Razor hints however that it’s simply “players need some challenge, people are disgusted by insects, let’s put big arse insects there, done”.
