The device that you are watching this video on was made in a factory.
Most of the things in your house were made in a factory. Many of their parts were made
in one factory and then shipped and assembled in another factory.
And all of those factories were made out of pieces that were made in another factory.
And managing all of that...
And all of those little moving parts...
(even the ones that weren’t made in literal factories)
thaaaat’s
LOGISTICS
[cheerful female voice singing] When technology knows right where everything goes, that's logistics!
Why am I talking about this
What does this have to do with video games?
Well, some people.
Some people…
derive a perverse sort of pleasure
from games about
logistics.
[upbeat piano continues]
I’m one of them.
Yes, buildin’ conveyor belts, and warehouses, and TRAINS...
oh yES TRAINS HELL YEAH [tooting in background]
[demonic voice] TRAINS.
And…
factories
Oh yes. We've got Satisfactories. And Infinifactories. And Fact…torios????
And all this stuff is great, you're gonna see why, you’re gonna believe me.
There's nothing wrong with liking these games, nothing wrong, nothing, nothing except the severe addictive
qualities they can have.
I mean, hours, GONE —
But that’s not what this video is about.
This video is about how these (snap) sorts (snap) of games can actually teach you a lot
about how a real world system of logistics works.
You remember, all those factories, right?
But what’s w e i r d is that these complicated video games are getting better and better at explaining
our wacky world of logistics
NOT
because they’re becoming better, more refined simulations…
But because our actual, real-world supply chain is becoming more and more like a video game.
Which is fu —
[gentle corporate pop music]
If you’re feeling a little lost at how overwhelming logistics can seem, don’t worry.
That’s actually a great metaphor for how you usually start in a logistics game.
With nothing.
Well, except maybe a verdant, untouched planet, teeming with bountiful resources for you to exploit.
And ohhhh boy are you gonna exploit those resources. It’s like the main thing you
do in these games!
WHY
To make something out of it.
WHY
To survive! ... And/or make a profit.
C-C-COLD HARD CASH
So you start simple: chopping down trees and picking up plants.
It’s slow at first, mining resources… manually. You might even think at this point
that these are survival games like The Forest or Valheim, but you’ve got more on your
mind than just base survival.
You’ve got a goal.
Maybe you’re building a way to escape from this bug-infested planet.
Or maybe something BIG. Like a Dyson sphere. Or a global terraforming project.
And so, you’ve gotta exploit those resources, dude!
Except...
...exploiting resources is kinda boring.
Which might seem weird since it's like, the main thing in these games.
It’s just that these games actually want it to be kinda boring.
Because that’s what finally encourages you to automate it.
Let me give you an example: say you want a metal rod.
Instead of mining iron yourself, you’d rather build something that does it for you.
And instead of running around delivering iron ore to your smelters.
You’d rather make a conveyor belt do it for you.
And instead of forging your own metal rods, you’d rather a factory forge one for you.
CONGRATULATIONS.
Thaaaaat’s logistics.
You’ve made a supply chain, with the raw materials for each step being sent onward
to the next.
As you research and unlock new technology, that supply chain grows more and more complex.
You discover and exploit new resources, requiring the construction of entirely new supply chains.
You have to start traveling farther to find those resources, and you probably need to
dramatically increase the supply of energy for all those new factories you're building.
Your transportation system becomes bigger and faster by necessity, as the “recipes”
you're making become longer and more complex. Frankly, it all gets really, really, really
messy.
But you’ve got to increase efficiency if you ever want to finish that big project and/or
get off this damned rock!
See those empty conveyor belts over there? That means you’re not producing stuff fast enough!
And those conveyor belts over there, that are FULL!?? THAT’S EVEN WORSE! Those are
resources that AREN’T being exploited, and that’s wasted potential. So you build more
factories to make use of those resources so there’s never any slack in the system.
Your growing factory starts to operate more and more like clockwork, with everything you
need arriving at just the right time, in just the right amounts.
You hardly make any of your own resources anymore. You have factories to make your factories
for you and blueprints to standardize them. With enough time and dedication to improving
your factory, that seemingly impossible goal becomes achievable.
And that’s a basic summary of how logistics games work.
But what if I told you that I’ve been secretly educating you!
Because I just gave you a basic history of logistics.
[corporate jazz]
It’s a little uncanny how much the player progression in logistics games matches with
the history of logistics, which is usually divided into three revolutions.
The first logistics revolution was when humans began to master agriculture: exploiting nature
to grow our own food, harvest energy resources, and craft simple tools to make this all easier
for us.
Oh, and also do war!
Historians point to things like food storage and fielding large armies as incredible feats
of ancient logistical planning. Soldiers need food and water and swords and shit and somehow
they did all this before trains, amazing. Well, the wars were terrible, but logistically
impressive.
And then, after a lot of hours of game time, I mean, civilization-building, the rise
of industrial manufacturing brings about the second logistical revolution. Higher density
energy, like coal and oil, allows humans to power wicked smoke-belching machines that
take jobs from skilled craftsmen and make a bunch of crap really fast.
King Ludd tried to warn us
Once far-away resources became accessible, especially if you had an empire and could
just say. Oh, cheerio! That's a nice spot of land you got over there! Looks like a lot of delicious ores.
I think I'll take it!
Anyway, these factories were a pretty big deal. Pretty soon, people are beeping around the
world with telegraphs, London’s a shithole, and oh yeah, we got
T r a i n s.
But we weren’t done with our big project, creating modern society, just yet. First, we needed
to invest a lot of research points into things like jet propulsion and massive container ships.
That tech allowed us to ship stuff globally really fast or really cheap.
In 1968 we unlocked the 20 x 8 x 8 standard cargo container.
Give it up for the standard cargo container.
[silence]
Now, ports across the world could all be designed to handle the same shape of cargo, a shape
that could easily be put on a train or truck bed. All together, these innovations exponentially
increased how much stuff we could move around the globe.
But what pains me to say as someone who really appreciates a good train and will settle for
a big boat, is that “information technology” was probably an even bigger deal.
As FedEx founder Fred Smith put it, “The information about the package is as important
as the package itself.”
Man, he should've put that into practice!
Or as UPS puts it in their incredibly educational advertisement:
[UPS ad singing] “When technology knows right
where everything goes, that’s logistics”
where everything goes that's logistics...
Knowing precisely where something is and when it will arrive allowed our logistical system
to evolve once again.
Welcome to — - Hammond: Jurassic Park
the third jist [laughing]
Welcome! To the third logistical revolution.
By tracking more things digitally, bottlenecks could be quickly identified and alleviated
so that the flow of materials and products could move even faster! No more empty or backed
up conveyor belts – instead, everything arrives just in time, in just the right amounts.
Or more precisely, thaaat’s just-in-time manufacturing.
This strategy for running a factory supply chain was invented and implemented by Toyota
engineer Taiichi Ohno in the 1930s but spread globally in the 1970s.
IT technology made implementing just-in-time logistics way easier, while the cost savings
in warehousing, manufacturing waste, and labor made it irresistible to manufacturers.
[UPS jingle] “There’ll be cheers on Wall Street, that’s logistics” [song slowing creepily]
And this is where our modern logistics system comes into focus. Manufacturing robots make factories
run like clockwork, while the Internet and ecommerce make global trade accessible to
the average person. Everything is quantified, tracked, and analyzed. We’ve got so much
data we start modeling how pears can get bruised in their shipping boxes.
Factories are supplying factories that are supplying factories in a massive global supply chain where everything
arrives just.
in. time.
[UPS jingle slowed very eerily] A continuous link that is always in sync, that’s logistics...
And nothing could possibly go wrong [EXTREMELY LOUD BOAT HONK] wait what the fuck is th —
[soothing corporate tunes]
Just-in-time logistics is kind of amazing when you think about it: it's like an incomprehensibly
large juggling act, with every component landing back in the clown's hand at just the right
time, only to be sent back into the air seconds later.
Now what happens when the clown gets Covid? [cough cough]
As much as just-in-time logistics sounds like a house of cards ready to fall over at any
moment, it’s actually pretty adaptable.
If a hurricane looked like it was gonna delay a shipment of sprockets to
one of your factories, you could order up a batch of gizmos from a different supplier and then everything
would continue running smoothly? More or less.
Most of the time?
The problem is that the system had a harder time coping with a disaster happening
to everyone, everywhere all at once.
And even worse was trying to get it started up again in the face of resurgent Covid variants
and a new land war in Eastern Europe.
Even though pandemics and wars aren’t something you have to worry about in these games, they
can illustrate some things about how hard it is to restart a supply chain. I’ve got a perfect example
from my Satisfactory playthrough.
At a certain point, I added one factory too many, and my powergrid failed. Restarting
it wasn’t as simple as just flipping a switch back on: I needed to get power to my water
pumps and coal mines before my power plants could restart, which required creating a smaller
power grid running off of burnt leaves just to jumpstart my main power grid.
Which is all to say, when disaster struck, restarting this one production line took a
lot of work. And in a really simplistic way, this is what it’s like restarting factories
in the real world, because a lot of them practically break down then they're not running.
Chemical storage tanks need to be flushed and then filled and then cleaned and then filled again or
else they might corrode.
Dust and mold gather on the inside of machines as they sit unused, and I don’t want dust
and mold on my metal rods!!!
And because of how much precision timing there is on an assembly line, every individual step
must be brought back online in a very specific order.
So imagine what that’s like when there's thousands of supply chains all starting up at once.
The system's adaptability was also strained after things got restarted: even when manufacturers
caught up with demand, there weren’t enough shipping containers to ship everything, and
then there wasn’t enough room at ports to unload everything.
And speaking of shipping containers and ports, there was also that really big boat,
that got stuck
in the Suez Canal.
The big boat got stuck!
You could not plan a more appropriate, dummy-thicc metaphor for the way our logistics system
has been designed, with an ever-growing demand for more stuff. So we’ve upgraded our container
ships with bigger and bigger designs: the Ever Given is literally one of the biggest
ships ever built.
ANd it Got STUCK
The Big Boat got STUCK
[laughing]
[wheezing]
And it got stuck!
The big boat got stuck!
When you’ve played these sorts of games, you can kind of understand why we went for
the MEGA HUGE CONTAINER SHIPS perk. I mean, I would.
I’d — I'd — first I'd go High Speed Rail, because, you know, TRAINS, but
big boats are cool too.
But the other thing players can see here is the bottleneck. The Suez Canal,
finished in 1869, was built long before anyone could have ever dreamed up an absolute unit like
the Ever Given. And so, not for the first time, the canal had to be upgraded to keep
pace with the explosive growth of big boats.
But the shock to the supply chain wasn’t just about the boats that got stuck, or the
factories that got shut down, or the overloaded ports. It was also about the people that worked there.
The pandemic affected people very differently depending on where they worked. I was one
of the lucky ones, who got to work from home. Most supply chain jobs can’t be done from home.
These people risked their lives to keep the supply chain moving instead of completely
collapsing. And they risked them again as the global logistics system started clawing
its way back. Things were harder than ever, and labor issues that weren’t great before
the pandemic got way, way worse.
Understandably, a lot of people left these sorts of jobs, making the “labor shortage/not
paying people enough crisis” even worse. Lots of the people who remained fought for
better treatment. Not everyone got it.
And for the most part, the response has not been more generous wages, or expanded benefits or
safer working conditions.
But you know what has expanded?
Gamification!
Turns out gamifying a job works best when the tasks are repetitive, like say, packing
metal rods in a warehouse. Gamifying that process with points and leaderboards reportedly
keeps workers focused and happier. It is also dehumanizing, as though they are little creatures
driven by treats and THE SPRAY.
And if gamifying doesn’t increase productivity to your liking, with enough automation and
digification, you can take the human element
out completely. Factory robots have been around for decades, but more and more warehouses
have turned to robots for their labor. Autonomous cargo trucks are now viewed as
something of a holy grail in an industry with a long-running and pandemic-exacerbated labor
shortage.
And boy do I hate saying this but… I… get it?
That’s the whole gameplay loop in this genre: this is boring, I don’t like having to do
this, how can I automate this process so I don’t have to do it anymore.
But like I said at the beginning of this video:
"There's nothing wrong with liking these games, nothing wrong —"
I don’t think that’s a bad thing…
in a video game.
In fact, I think it’s cool that human brains get enjoyment from solving little problems.
We like to fix things! And that’s really the core game loop of logistics games: solving
a problem so effectively that you never have to deal with it again… only so that you
can go find another problem to solve.
It’s self-interested, yes, but in the same way that it’s “self-interested” to use a
dishwasher to make doing the dishes easier.
But Jeffy B doing it? Well, it hits different.
Sure, the drive to gamify warehouses and automate package delivery is an attempt to solve a
“problem” in the same way you automate to solve “problems” in these games.
It’s just that the “problem” being solved here is that human laborers need things like
bathroom breaks, and sick days, and predictable scheduling, and all that decency ultimately
costs a big chunk of change.
The incentive isn’t to save Bezos some personal labor, or even give him the pleasure of creating
a perfect little system in a consequence-free environment — it’s just fiduciary. A “responsibility”
to the stockholders to make the most money.
Logistics games try to grapple with the endless cycle of expansion and exploitation — oftentimes
in ways that reflect our reality.
Satisfactory and Railgrade, offer a critique of corporate indifference by putting you to
work for a megacorp that clearly doesn't think of you as much more than another cog in its machine.
And the games that don’t directly contend with the moral implications of your resource
harvesting at least give you a goal that’s more erudite than simple profit, like building
a Dyson sphere or terraforming a planet and taking care of the people who live there.
And yet it’s this very drive to automate that’s made our logistics system feel more
and more like a video game. The software that runs these warehouses looks like it would fit right in.
Of course, outside of the controlled environments of a factory or warehouse, automation gets
trickier. Real life doesn’t work as flawlessly as a video game.
I’m just saying, that those little delivery robots do not inspire a lot of confidence.
And uhhhhhhh I’ll bet I'll be completely pancaked by an autonomous semi-truck long before railroad workers
can get more than a few days of sick leave.
The 4th logistics revolution sure is gonna be fun.
[upbeat jazzy music]
I do want to reiterate that despite these games sounding like rapacious capitalism
simulators, I don’t think playing them makes you a bad person.
They use elegant game design to craft a satisfying problem-solving experience. Some of the player
progression in these games is the smartest I’ve seen across any genre because of how
much they trust the player to solve problems through experience.
They’re also typically a chill place to spend time. I’ve watched like 3... 4 seasons
of Deep Space Nine while playing Satisfactory,
- Workers of the world... unite.
- [Clayton] And for me personally, it’s incredibly gratifying to see some massive structure being built
in the sky, or a dead planet bloom thanks to your countless hours of effort. Some even
tell shockingly good stories within the context of logistics.
But as far as our real world system of logistics becoming more like a video game?
Don’T! Don’t Do that! I don’t need same-day shipping on my metal rods!!!!
It's fine.
I could wait a couple days.
[what i must describe as cheesy vacation music]