Barks
by Aria Salvatrice

Few who play Factorio engage with nuclear energy: coal is more than enough to win the game. Even for a factory that aims farther than the finish line, photovoltaics scale easily.
You only need the absurd power found in those shiny green ore patches for the most ambitious builds.

Of those who tried to use nuclear power, fewer realize that the fictional Kovarex enrichment process, used to improve Uranium-238 into Uranium-235, is named after Michal Kovařík, one of the founders of Wube Software. (Few players realize the Factorio company is named Wube, either.)

Before we start, an important question of geography

This might be unexpected, but i need you to point Prague on a map.

Just do it. Place your finger or your mouse cursor where you think it is.

Do it. Trust me.

Easy, right? Let’s check how accurate was your guess:

Reveal answer

Understanding their culture

It’s frequent to see social media people from the USA who don’t play Factorio be extremely angry at it. A few years ago, i had to contend multiple times with such USians on Twitter (now known as Divorced.com).
Followers i didn’t know at all, haranguing me about it, expecting me to hear their problem.

Their problem is simple: a few years ago, Michal Kovařík, Kovarex, wrote a blog post lauding the technical writing of a man who happens to promote unfortunate local politics in a foreign shithole country.

A Reddit dweller tried to start a fight about that article. Our Kovarex snapped, and told them to fuck off, in terms as brusque as i put it.

Foreigners entirely unable to point Prague on a map felt entitled to turn it into a huge incident about their local politics. To accuse the company of sharing the responsibility for for the faux pas. To accuse the Czech developers from Prague of promoting whatever hate local politicians from the Republican Party (a right-wing nationalist party in the United States) promote in exotic occidental lands.

Don’t get me wrong: some of my best friends are USians, and i don’t think they are an uncivilized people. Not every USian is a bad person, and they are humans just as much as Europeans are.
But have you ever heard about things like “Civil Asset Forfeiture”? It’s frankly wild to read about the sort of zany shit they will do in countries without health care.

To space

Space Exploration was one of the most impressive Factorio mods. It was so impressive, Wube software made their expansion pack Space Exploration… done better. It’s called Space Age.

That doesn’t mean they stole Space Exploration from the modder, Earendel. No. They hired Earendel, who was one of the leading artists working on the expansion. And it’s not just that: Earendel originally created Space Exploration by extrapolating on early ideas the Factorio team shared publicly, many years ago. Hiring the modder was a natural fit.

Much of the team comes from the modder community, and they maintain mods on the side of their jobs.
As recently as four months ago, our Kovarex was straight-up offering a job on the spot to someone making a smart technical suggestion on Reddit.

For years, the game supported features such as fluid temperature, having multiple planets, having multiple factions… And made no use of those features. Only modders used them, until the Space Age expansion made their purpose apparent.

It’s easy for modders to get in touch with someone at Wube who will be sympathetic to their needs: very often, the patch notes for the game pertain to new additions to the modding API, often spurred by a modder’s need. And while the game won’t be open-sourced while it is still actively commercialized and updated, many modders were granted private access to the source code.

Wube also communicates often, primarily in the form of detailed blog posts. The authors of those posts vary a lot, and since 2012, they have produced almost 500 blog posts. Many of these posts are masterclasses in various aspects of game development and UI design.

The Factorio team is the best in the game: they’re all about finding the most passionate person for the job, taking the time to overengineer the hell out of the best solution possible, and having their diligence pay dividends. There is no room for a cult of personality in their company culture, there is no star director taking credit on behalf of the grunts. There are sometimes disagreements between team members, and they are not shy in blogging about them, but they do not allow those disagreements to get in the way of their collective vision.

In the last blog post for the foreseeable future, Kovarex signs off, saying he doesn’t know what will be Wube’s next game, and he will be playing World of Warcraft while figuring it out.

One thing you’ll notice in his last post—and i wish to say so without any hint of criticism—is that in twelve years of development, our Kovarex hasn’t put in significant practice writing the language of foreigners. Other Czech people from the company write it much more fluently. But i am very thankful we can share the same foreign language, of course: i do not speak a single word of Czech, his command of English is more than sufficient to convey clearly what’s on his mind, and all the English text that makes it into the game is perfectly idiomatic.

More shit at the wall

Accusing our Kovarex of whatever internal problems USians have with their local politics wasn’t gonna stick. Everyone saw through the bullshit. So people dug up more dirt. And they found a smoking gun under layers and layers of dirt: a very unfortunate years-old Reddit comment.

It was seven years ago. Seven.

That means you have to dig seven whole years back before you can find him saying something people will dislike.

What he said, i quote verbatim, was “[removed]”.

Yes, he deleted it, he no longer stands by it.

He deleted it because it was a bad idea. Bickering in English about the English vocabulary used to talk about the age of consent: not advisable to do this when your command of the language remains limited.

Now, it’s kinda well known i’m a survivor of child rape, sent a rapist in prison for 20 years. Interact with me long enough and you’ll hear this story. I care a lot about child abuse. If i randomly stumbled upon this post seven years ago, i’d reply, “dude, the fuck is wrong with you”?

But importantly, i’m not stumbling upon it randomly. It’s been brought to my attention intently. People went through seven whole years of posts to find one that could piss me off, and that post has to be brought to me in the form of screenshots, as the actual post was deleted.

What do USians expect when they come to me, when i talk about Factorio, and demand that i deal with their issues—and demand it without ever giving me the courtesy of a warning before bringing the topic of child abuse to my doorstep?
Do they expect i will apologize on the behalf of everyone in the Czech republic who voted for the “Grab Them By The Pussy” guy?
Do they expect i will uninstall the game and PayPal them 50 US dollars for their emotional labor of educating me in the ways i am a terrible person?

Nah. Best i can do for y’all Yanks is a “oh, it’s unfortunate the guy wrote then deleted that stupid post over two thousand five hundred fifty-five days ago, i’m sorry you feel angry i’m playing a videogame he worked on.”

Why do people come to me with a bad attitude when i mention Factorio? It is clear none have managed to make that Kovarex feel hurt: he has not brought up the matter again.
So if they can’t hurt him, they’ll have to find someone else to hurt.
And since Factorio appeals a lot to autists, it’s easy to find targets without the social scripts to defuse people coming to them with entitled outrage and vague demands of accountability.

Death of the intellectual property holder

It always feels like a warning sign when someone’s trying to police engaging with Lovecraft’s stories.

That Lovecraft nerd? Big time racist. Hard-R type of racist. Total chud by the standards of his contemporaries. In his stories, he shows, in addition of the tentacles and the horrors, his whole ass.

But anyone telling you not to engage with his writing has internalized cop syndrome: the guy died 87 years ago.
He died young, aged 46, having written of budding regret in his heart for his prejudice.
He has no way to reflect further on his behavior and make amends.
He has no way to employ his money to spread more hate.
The author is dead and buried.
There will never be a less racist Lovecraft.
There will never be a more racist Lovecraft.
All there are are books you can choose to read or not, some parts are yikes. (Myself, i have not read them, as i am illiterate.)
If you’re gonna read them, there’s only so many genuflections and ablutions you can make.

Sometimes the work is just interesting enough you’ll want to put in the work to separate the art from the nazi.

And similarly, sometimes people say “fuck Harry Potter, stop engaging with it”, right? But this one is different, i promise.

I never watched the Harry Potter movies.
Much less read the books (i am illiterate).
It’s quite plausible the camera operator was racist, i guess.
And i won’t vouch that the second assistant director never used ableist words.
That one Daniel Radcliffe guy seems all right, he wrote he’s cool with trans people.
Emma Watson did the same, i hear those people worked on that movie, according to to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
No hate to them.

Look, nobody says “stop engaging with Harry Potter” because one big shot involved in the franchise made stupid posts years ago, then never made additional stupid posts.
We say “stop engaging with Harry Potter” because the celebrity author of the books is very much not dead, and actively engaged in fighting against transgender rights. Engagement with the work grants the author money and social proof.

All day, all she’s angry about, it’s trans people existing and chillaxing.
All day, all he’s angry about, tragically: it’s well known much of that anger stems from repressing their own transmasculine feelings.

The author fights with influence and money, both obtained from the sales of products bearing the Harry Potter brand.

The desire for an intellectual “separation of the art and the artist” does not entail a material “separation of the intellectual property holder and the recipient of royalties”.

When you buy Harry Potter shit, money goes directly into her pockets, and she burns it all on being the biggest hater possible instead of buying yachts and cocaine.

But when you buy Factorio, you put the money in the pocket of a large team of cool Czech nerds, including one guy who made cringe posts seven whole years ago.

When you treat all those cases as equal causes for outrage, you ensure nobody will ever take me seriously when i tell people they should not engage with Harry Potter products, or, for that matter, with Israeli products. You also ensure i’ll know you are exhausting to deal with: i’ll adjust my berth.