Mark Darrah on 832 Hours in Factorio: What Games Reveal About Programmers

Mark Darrah, co-director of Dragon Age: Origins and former executive producer of the Dragon Age series, spends his time between running a game design consultancy and creating YouTube content about development. In a recent interview with PC Gamer's Disk Cleanup feature, he opened his Steam library to discuss what games reveal about how people think.

Factorio dominates Darrah's playtime with 832 hours logged. He plays the factory-building game with his son, particularly the Space Age expansion. "If you want to know what kind of programmer someone would be, have them play Factorio for 25 hours and look at what their base looks like," Darrah says. He describes his own approach as pragmatic but messy: "I'm a programmer who will keep it working, but also there's going to be a lot of binder twine and duct tape holding the thing together, and definitely you can see that in my Factorio bases."

Darrah began playing Factorio more than 12 years ago, before Dragon Age: Inquisition shipped. His son approaches the game differently, with an engineering mindset that leads him to plan, deconstruct, and rebuild bases methodically. Darrah's bases, by contrast, become what he calls "amoeba monstrosities." He identifies three distinct phases in Factorio: the early running-around section, which he finds tedious; the middle automation phase; and the newer multi-planet, spaceship-building endgame introduced by Space Age.

Beyond Factorio, Darrah's library reflects a developer's learning approach. He recently played Eternal Strands, a first game from a studio where he has professional connections. He praises it as "a very good first game" and compares its combat system favorably to Magicka, the element-combining wizard game.

Riven sits installed on his PC, though Darrah has only invested three minutes into the 1997 puzzle game. He installed it after puzzle design came up in conversations twice within two years, which he considers a good sign for a game of its age. "I've heard people talk about it from a puzzle design perspective," he says. Darrah notes that BioWare's longstanding philosophy, one he helped uphold, was making puzzles completable by all players, sometimes by placing solutions directly beside the puzzles. "A puzzle game like Riven cannot do that," he acknowledges, indicating his interest in learning from a different design approach.

Dragon Age: Origins remains installed as his oldest game by release date, excluding remasters. Though Darrah does not typically play games he worked on after release, he has played through Dragon Age: Origins on stream for his YouTube channel, capturing footage for videos discussing his memories. He estimates he has seen about 60 percent of the game's content but has only played about 6 percent. "I remember a lot, but I also have weird blind spots," he says. He also notes that his memory sometimes reconstructs older versions of levels that no longer exist in the final game.

After 29 years in game development, Darrah approaches games deliberately. He often plays just long enough to understand what a game is attempting and extract lessons before moving on. Balatro, Unpacking, and other shorter titles serve this purpose well. Civilization, however, is his time sink. He has played through multiple entries in the series, including the one before Alpha Centauri, Alpha Centauri itself, and later editions of Civilization. "You have to play through Civ at least once to understand it," he explains.

Darrah does not uninstall games when migrating between PCs; he simply leaves them behind. If he were to reinstall one first on a new machine, it would be Factorio. The game's prominence in his library reflects both his personal enjoyment and his belief that it serves as a window into how developers and engineers approach problems.