I tend to agree with you - but actually I love programming itself and I could do it all day without getting tired. The things that tire me out about work are poor documentation, inconsistent requirements, team politics, other people’s mistakes, compiler errors, version conflicts, the stress of having to deliver by a deadline or having other people depend on me, etc.

Factorio has none of that, it’s just a constant stream of positive mental stimulation.

I guess there's a few parts to it, for me.

There's "the itch" - the desire to program, to build something. Which I do find coding-style games tend to satisfy (so there's the fear I will have lessened motivation to work on my side project).

Then there's the "focus" side - I still love programming (and consider myself blessed for that). By "only have so much programming in me" I meant more "I have a limited ability to deeply focus within a given day/week". So I don't want to be thinking too hard when I game - I want to lose myself in the flow specifically without having to concentrate too hard (I find books/movies and playing hockey are great for this too).

Please note, I'm not arguing with anyone here - I guess I'm just talking out loud. It's not my intention to denigrate Factorio-style games in any way.

That’s not true. It can if you go play on some servers!

Different strokes for different people of course.

Yeah, that’s what always stops me from playing these. It’s fun at first (like any new project) but then I realise I could be doing exactly the same work and getting paid for it. Which I guess makes me super lucky in the “I get paid to play video games” sense.

That's kinda why I have taken up traditional film photography recently as a hobby, instead of just playing video games. Most of the video games I would be interested in playing would lean more towards the intellectual type games like Factorio, but yeah it those felt enough like work. I'd get bored playing more mindless games like GTA5 after a few hours, after the thrill of the graphics and open world gameplay died down. Photography has put my mind into a entirely different space, and challenged me in different ways than I'm used too.

I definitely found this with minecraft - building stuff there scratches the same itch as programming, so I mostly stopped doing it, since I'd rather make useful things than some random build in a world only I am ever going to see

But I love programming, why do I need to escape something I like? Even though you code professionally, doesn't mean you can enjoy programming personally.