"You ever play Factorio?"

That was all it took to get sucked in to the void of oblivion. After watching a Youtube video about it I decide to throw down the $30 instantly and I've been playing ever since. I don't spend money on a lot of things (except crypto) so buying the game after watching a 2 min video is pretty significant.

I have played over 400 days of World of Warcraft. That's 10,000 hours. I've also played 1000's of hours of Starcraft and Poker. Although I must admit I've never been addicted to gambling. I view it more as a job. Anyway, the point is, I have a problem.

Yesterday I was up 24 hours playing this game. Only got up to eat quickly and use the bathroom a few times. I knew for a fact this was going to happen when I was watching how the game worked. If I'm being honest I'm surprised I'm not playing right now. I'll get back to it soon.

I've found that waking up in the morning allows me to break my addictions. If I harness a little self control in the morning I can break away cold turkey but normally I trick myself into playing "just one game" or smoking "just one bowl". If that happens, it's all over. I'll be doing the thing compulsively for the rest of the day. Good thing I don't smoke anymore. That shit makes me extra dumb.

I've turned my addiction to crypto for a year. Where did I go wrong? The gameplay of Factorio is the exact solution to a problem I have been dealing with. This game is incredible. It's very Indie. It was developed by a team of 18 in Prague, so obviously it's not the graphics I'm interested in.

You've crash landed on an alien planet. You are the only survivor. What do you do? Well, if you're an engineer in factorio, you start automating factories that that harvest the resources of the planet so you can eventually build a rocket and get out of there.

Even after playing this game for 24 hours, I still haven't even scratched the surface. I completed all the tutorial and campaign levels I could find but I still haven't even built like 80% of the things available in the game. The one saving grace of this game is that it's a bit of a sandbox like MineCraft, and I hate sandboxes. I want to be given a goal to accomplish.

I feel as though this game was written by programmers for programmers. If you are a programmer, you will like this game. The gameplay mimics programming. The automation you set up acts like a program. It's also just a good game though, so many people like it.

Problem

I want to create block-based video games. I want the digital items in these games to be worth money and easily tradable. I plan to accomplish this by a system of puzzle games as CAPTCHAs.

In essence, you prove that you solved the puzzle (without giving away the answer) and this is a kind of proof-of-work. Dare I say proof-of-brain.

Well this game, my friends, is one of the most perfect candidates I have ever seen for puzzle games as proof-of-work. AI is not good enough to program. By extension, this game would be extremely difficult to cheat with a bot because it is an extension of the tenants of programming.

Seriously though, this game is intense. Every solution is unique. It gives a visual representation of how two programs with exactly the same goal could be accomplished completely differently. No two solutions are ever going to look alike. This game has a real untapped blockchain power.

Imagine getting paid to play this game. I believe those days are coming Soon™.