Learning Factory

So. Is Learning Factory a good *game*? It's at least a 7/10. Good gameplay loop even if sparse on explaining elements of factory games like how you're apparently not supposed to throw everything into a central storage and let machines sort it out. And without that explainer, it becomes very easy to struggle at keeping stores stocked and money incoming. But, Learning Factory is also an attempt at teaching Machine Learning. Is it good at that? No. It's not. The machine learning comes too late in the game for most players it would seem judging by Steam Achievements, and it's not well explained. Ironically, despite the devs clearly loving this topic, the game does show one of the flaws with machine learning in that if you let the machines pick the price, well, they'll just go higher than the granny cats can afford! But alas, how machines are behind a lot of price gouging and are why you cannot afford groceries is not the point of the game. The point of the game is to learn about ML while building factories for cats. Which. You might get an explainer on what a ML model is. But not really what it can do beyond price gouge poor little granny cats and the average joe schmoe cat. There are some explainers if you read them, but they require a certain understanding of computer science to really comprehend. Oh, and there's a "CatGPT" upgrade providing usecase no one uses chatgpt for, and really? We're going to boost the ML model that's given actually useful and not environmentally devastating ML models a bad reputation? Really!? I'm just going to heave a sigh and say that even if you click the education tab of the lengthy main menu, it just offers coursera courses, links to competitions promoting GenAI, and some youtube things with special promotions. Nothing about the actually extremely cool models based on scientific data specifically (and only that, no OpenAI grifts) that would really get young folks excited about ML. A cat factory game is a fun idea, but I think the devs need to take a step back and ask themselves if this is really the most fun ML can be? If there aren't more world changing, and societally beneficial ways to use ML and show ML being used. Otherwise...It's just price gouging little granny cats, and no one wants that.

Entertaining cat themed automation game. It was worth the wait!