Schools still make you manually understand math even though calculators have been perfect for decades. Because it turns out having some magic machine spit out an answer you can’t understand isn’t good and you’ll have no ability to understand when and why the answer is incorrect.
I found Factorio being a good paradigm for that. The core game loop is essentially: "Do a task manually, then automate it; then do a higher-level task manually that only became feasible through the automation; then automate that as well, etc etc".
But throughout the game, you often drop back down into the lower level tasks, e.g. to understand problems or change the workflow. So in the end an understanding of the entire "stack" of tasks on different abstraction levels is necessary to make progress.
This always felt like a good analogy to programming, or really scientific knowledge in general.
Shapez 2 (and I guess Shapez 1) both feel cartoony and abstract enough that it doesn't make you feel like you're polluting a whole planet and killing the wildlife.
But that very same cartooniness also made it less interesting to me; the things you're producing are just too arbitrary.
It seems very sysphean to me, a slightly different boulder everytime.
This time, in games, we assign it to ourselves. It isn't even a a burden layed upon us by the gods. Did we shape ourselves such that this is now what we entertain? Or did sysphius already like pushing that Boulder?
What about all the time in between. Im not for going back to hunter gathering, but what about all the things we do all this society for, all the things inbetween. Wouldn't you want to be spending time doing that.
> Are there any games that teach automation like Factorio but that don't have that depressive dystopian magnasanti feel?
And as the opposite question: are there games that give more of that feeling?
I want to feel like I'm playing the human faction in Starship Troopers or on Pandora in Avatar, but in the more factory building sense, where you supply a war machine or the industrial capacity that will inevitably make the local ecosystems and planet perish.
On the more bright and cheerful side, though, Satisfactory is great, Captain of Industry might be worthy of a look (you're literally helping a settlement of humans survive), maybe Mindustry for something a bit simpler or Factory Town. I'd also mention Urbek City Builder and Timberborn as loosely related, albeit they can feel just more like puzzle games.
I think until the third year of high school you should do without a calculator. There really is no substitute for being able to do basic math in your head. It also helps you to later on spot order of magnitude errors and such, as well as to do good first order of approximation estimates.
In my ninth grade physics class we had to use a slide rule to do calculations for the first three months to help develop that intuition for orders of magnitude. Also because our teacher was just tired of people reporting results to nine significant figures for measurements they made with a meter stick.
Oh yeah learning to use slide rule is like a superpower when it comes to understanding orders of magnitude and significant figures.
It's also a great way to become very comfortable with logarithms.
I'm a bit different then, maths only started to make sense well after picking up a calculator; Wolfram notebooks, Excel and SQL were much easier for me to grok than attempting the equivalent by heart/head/hand.
Nowadays, math concepts or papers only makes sense when I can properly implement them as query, it's somehow a basic translation step I need.
