Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Late Stage Capitalism, But In Space!

2025-Dec-31

Dearest blog readers, let me assure you that the development team here at fredlambuth.com follow the utmost professional writing practices. Among the staff, we adhere to the Ernest Hemingway school of writing. With quite a few corollaries from the teachings of Hunter Thompson added to that.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are correct to assume we are prepared for the job of delivering a quality blog post. Around this domain, we make sure we are overflowing with vim and vigor before arming ourselves with our writing implements. Writing is a thirsty business. Our writers are expertly provisioned for their craft. For an august occasion such as an end of year review.. Well, that would require all team members to be properly fueled for precision writing delivery. Support staff as well, not just the field agents.

As far as we can guess, the graphics dept is also primed for adhering to the same standards as the writers. The graphics department does not respond to work orders in anything that resembles human language. In person they do make hideous sparse noises when pressed for an answer. Their preferred manner of discourse is leaving cryptic written communiques that come close to being understandable. 5/9 times they come through on their graphic accompaniments, according to an informal census among the editors. Difficult as these graphics types are to handle, they too require just as much creative fueling as the writing team.

Had you read the annals of the fredlambuth.com blog in prior years (decades if you read the previous versions!), you’d likely find a helluva lot more posts about video games. Not just quantity, but variety. So many different stripes of games; each getting quite a bit of written opinions of mine dedicated to them.

The need to express my thoughts about video games comes from decades of playing the damned things. So, so many video games, of just about every type. (Except for sports games.That is kind of a blind spot in my survey of the medium.) There are so many different genres I was interested in. Finding a favorite has always been difficult to say.

Strategy’ish stuff has proven through in the muck for me over the years. Ever since I knew these kinds of games were possible (the PC in the 90s being the frontier of these styles of games) I was drawn to them. Now I can collect my thoughts to see I enjoy managing large collections of moving parts. Armies, cities, space empires, or train systems. At the time of discovering strategy video games, they felt like tools to make my pretend fights set up among my tops become something more than just my imaginings. Video games could approximate the visual reality of these toy fights.

If you look at the past few years (which is all you can from the domain name. Version 4.0. The Flask version that has been deployed since 2023. The prior versions, and its blog posts, are archived) you will see one game getting mentioned much more than others. Satisfactory. Possibly, the last game I’ll ever play. Not exactly a strategy game. It is a game that has brought me to personal records of off-game strategizing and total hours recorded on Steam. Before that it was a tie between Civilization 5 and 6.

I have wasted so many hours thinking about how to make my collection of moving parts cooperate with my other moving parts. All in my colorful, geographically distributed playhouse of automated conveyor belts. Is it a waste, though? If i built a diorama with cardboard of this same factory, would that be more rewarding?

That tag line ‘the last game you will ever play’ was something I first heard used for World of Warcraft. Something heard over two decades before the date of this writing. Back then, the slogan sounded dreadful to me. Less like an act of recreation and more like a prison sentence. A marriage. A death of creativity. The signalling of the arrested development of an art form that had yet to do anything that broke out of its original form.

I did not know it until after social media pervaded everyone's lives, but a strong reason why World of Warcraft would be the last game you ever played is because of the social media features it had. Having online servers that connected online accounts was what made the game so special at the time. And I guess to this day? Are people playing WoW right now because the game mechanics are great? My guess is no. When I dipped my toes into the game, grinding through the levels to get to the levels my friends played at was a grind, not a delight. The art style did look cool. I thought so at the time. It became so popular that it looks somewhat generic now. Like a phone game. A problem of genre defining success.

My predictions about Satisfactory being the last game I will ever play stem from the game itself. There is no social reward on my part for playing this game. There are multiplayer options for this game. Be that as it may, I do not associate with anybody who would want to collaborate online to build in my factory playland. Nor am I that interested in working in somebody else’s factory world. Not at this juncture in time.

At this time, the strongest reason to forecast Satisfactory being the last game I put the effort into mastering is my video game fatigue. The novelty, the spark, the yen for playing new games is dissipating. Expansive digital world that requires a big time purchase sounds too committal. It’s not impossible to see a change. I just started playing Slay The Spire and can see at least a powerful affair happening with that small yet deep card game. Because its mechanics are limited is why I think I could dig this game. It promises deep yet short experiences.

Why Satisfactory is expected to be the last deep game we ever play around here is because the developers here love the game. Much because playing the game is the more fun version of their normal professional duties. Getting new features running on fredlambuth.com can be an arduous task. If changes need to be made down to the data input level, several plans have to be made to keep things working without interruption. To consider all the downstream layers of processing that need to accommodate new or changed environments can become a herculean task. The same applies to several likely scenarios to a well maintained stage 5 experience of playing Satisfactory. (The game's complexity is broken into stages. I think 5 or 6 is the last one.)

Both software development and fantasy factory building seem to tickle the same part of my brain. When I was fresh over the hurdle of ‘getting’ how to use a programming language, I dove exuberantly into the idea. To program!

There was so much opportunity to program whatever could be hosted on computer memory. I built things. Terrible, stupid, flawed things that were very, very simple. Building those little dumb coding novelties showed me more over the horizon of what I could stitch together with programming. Like the mid-level experience of Satisfactory!

My coding developments then became medium sized things cobbled together from all those tiny things I made before, sometimes remade (refactored!) with improvements. That development learning path proceeds to this day. When I try a new programming concept, I make something simple, bolt on new stuff, then every now and then start fresh with all the tricks I’ve learned. The final product gets larger and larger. When the time comes to redo the modules, that usually means they get smaller!

My discovery of how to effectively play Satisfactory could be described to follow the same path as my computer science problem solving skills. CS to me is more about solving the problems rather than the hardware or techstack used to solve the problem. Using the right tool for the job is all that matters. Making it elegant.

These hundreds of hours in Satisfactory have shown me how to use the tools that Coffee Stain Studios made for the players of their game. Visually rendered tools to build resource gathering supply lines. I’m not the best. I do not want to be, but I do want to make my experiences improved. That’s a goal I can see happening by building one improved module at a time. I’m not the flashiest builder of digital factories. Most of what I build can be done with 20 or so fabricated units from the in-game building menu. The 4 cubic meter concrete block is my paintbrush.

Steam says I've a little over 500 hours of playtime accumulated. When I do find the urge to play, it seems to happen in 30-60 minute spurts. The first 100-200 hours was when I could do multi-hour benders. When the love affair was still burning hot. My factory world is large. This automated playground can become a little bit of a job if I put any expectations on it. To think about its rate of change. Perhaps it will be the garden I tend to throughout my years, one hour at a time, or one building objective at a time.

For the end of year huddle, here are some oneliners for the other stuff I’ve been chewing on:

I saw a few movies in the theater this year. Bugonia was the one that had me think about it the most after the screening.

Read two Alastair Reynolds novels back to back. My first. They both started with so much high-brow deep space promise. Both ended in doldrums after all the sci-fi stuff got explained.

Columbo is amazing! There is more to it than the comfort of predictable television. There are layers to every season of that show.