Me: The thing is I'm not sure it's even possible to do a non-problematic "ethical" factory game at this point. Like, sure you can design it so that genocide and colonization aren't part of your particular game, but so many of the genre tropes are stained with them. There's a patina of colonialist thinking over everything: the idea of untouched nature as being useless except for raw material for your factory, or as a trash dump for pollution. Even if you try to avoid all the negative implications you're still building on a genre which is a fever dream of capitalism: you're playing a one-man colonization and industrialization of unspoiled nature. You're like an incarnation of Columbia, manifest destiny in human form.
And in many ways, Factorio dropping the ball so obviously (with the "watch out for the natives!" line) was probably a good thing for the discourse about factory games. Otherwise we could have had this entire genre, with all the same unfortunate implications and unaddressed biases, without the obvious pointer that this is a colonialist power fantasy, you know? Factorio said the quiet part out loud, making it impossible to ignore the inherent ethical issues of this genre.
Cali: good points, sure, but my factory game is about kidnapping men, feminizing then, and sexually exploiting them.
Me: uhh. Okay so while you may be trying (like all factory game creators, hopefully) to remove the obvious ethical issues with the genre, that's kinda overshadowed by the HUGE BUCKET OF NEW ONES you've dumped on it.
