I really do prefer my hopeful speculative fiction much more these days, this is the one that sticks out the most to me recently: It Could Happen Here | CZM Book Club: The Lost Roads by Sim Kern, as well as the game Terra Nil. There’sa really healing quality to seeing someone else’s imagination of a better world.

Satisfactory is fascinating though. At first I was wondering why it was such a beautiful game. They made a stunning alien world.

Then as I slowly decimated the landscape and covered it in brutalist industrial architecture the message became clear about how the drive towards infinite growth is so destructive. Nobody made me do it, but to advance according to the company’s incentive structure I had to. I try to compactify and grow vertical, and offshore my big structures, and that’s arguably better, but then the vistas are always marred. You can actually use geothermal energy, but in order to get there you need petroleum for plastic for computers, and the byproducts of that basically guarantee you will be fossil fuel dependent by that point, and even then geothermal can’t sustain your whole operation. It’s an incredibly well constructed ludonarrative.

Also you can’t sleep. At all. There’s a bed but you can’t use it, you just work all through every night. I’m pretty sure the company has augmented the character with cybernetics to make them the perfect worker.

Then I saw that galaxy and I was like oh… oh no. We are the universe-eating scourge civ that Fermi was theorising about. We will destroy everything in our path.