It’s unquestionably ecological, and the way the game frames it sure makes it feel intentional, but it’s not really a deep level of discourse. Different buildings output different amounts of pollution, which diffuses throughout the world and triggers both biter attacks and evolution (limited to scaling HP/damage/size). Trees will absorb pollution (preventing it from dispersing further), but get sicker and die over time, turning the world into a barren wasteland surrounding an ever-expanding factory. Players have the ability to slot mods into buildings to cut their pollution output by up to 80%, but almost nobody ever does this, because the biters aren’t really a threat except on extreme difficulty levels, and those mods take up slots that could otherwise be used to boost speed/productivity.

This certainly could just be a way to throw some challenge in, but in that case, it’d be much easier to just have the biter attacks happen at semi-random times, maybe modified by how much energy the factory uses over a given period of time. In terms of ramping up the challenge, this would produce results very similar to the actual game, without tracking individual packets of pollution as they diffuse over every square in the game grid and are absorbed by trees, all of which track how much pollution they can absorb individually before they die.

That ecological damage is modeled at all, and that the pollution subsystem is as detailed as it is, certainly suggests to me that showing the player the negative impact of their presence is fully intentional (and it’s always a negative impact). I think there’s too much effort being spent (both in dev time and in per-tick updates) to suggest that it’s just a challenge system; almost nothing else in the game is tracked at the same level of granularity or downstream impact as pollution. Ore patches track how much ore each segment has remaining, but that value doesn’t matter beyond knowing how long a patch will be good for; miners don’t start pulling up less ore per second or harder to process chunks as a patch is depleted. Liquids and gasses in storage/pipelines track their own temperature, but the game doesn’t care about modeling how a tanker full of steam loses temperature over time.

All that said, I think casting Factorio’s gameplay as a criticism of indigenous peoples requires some pretty tortured logic. Biters are far dumber than most animals; their attacks amount to “run in a straight line at wherever that pollution came from”, which is one of the reasons they aren’t a major threat. They are unquestionably demonized; biters are 100% hostile the second they see you even if you’ve never produced any pollution, there’s no way to interact with them in any way but violence, and they’re big gross bugs. But I think this is better viewed through the lens of gameplay and of the ecological commentary. They’re big, ugly, and completely hostile to make it clear to the player that they’re your enemies. And they weaken the ecological commentary intentionally or not; there are no “neutral” animals, just biters, and the player doesn’t kill off anything cute.

Yeah, their espresso is also roasted to death.

I think there’s massive untapped demand for things like mini city cars and kei trucks.

Not just that, but even the more middle ground small cars. I’d love to have an EV truck sized the way they were in the 80’s/90’s (which was more or less comparable to a midsize sedan, just taller). The push to bigger and bigger wheelbases to take advantage of loopholes in the efficiency standards really doesn’t need to be reflected in EVs, but it’s what all the major automakers are doing.

Nah, these accusations of racism from a company owned by an Apartheid era South African emerald mine heir are too racist.

Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive.

This is factually untrue. For example, Stable Diffusion models are in the range of 2GB to 8GB, trained on a set of 5.85 billion images. If it was storing the images, that would allow approximately 1 byte for each image, and there are only 256 possibilities for a single byte. Images are downloaded as part of training the model, but they’re eventually “destroyed”; the model doesn’t contain them at all, and it doesn’t need to refer back to them to generate new images.

It’s absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images, but the product of training is a model that doesn’t contain any of the original images.

None of that is to say that there is absolutely no valid copyright claim, but it seems like either option is pretty bad, long term. AI generated content is going to put a lot of people out of work and result in a lot of money for a few rich people, based off of the work of others who aren’t getting a cut. That’s bad.

But the converse, where we say that copyright is maintained even if a work is only stored as weights in a neural network is also pretty bad; you’re going to have a very hard time defining that in such a way that it doesn’t cover the way humans store information and integrate it to create new art. That’s also bad. I’m pretty sure that nobody who creates art wants to have to pay Disney a cut because one time you looked at some images they own.

The best you’re likely to do in that situation is say it’s ok if a human does it, but not a computer. But that still hits a lot of stumbling blocks around definitions, especially where computers are used to create art constantly. And if we ever hit the point where digital consciousness is possible, that adds a whole host of civil rights issues.