This is why, from the beginning, Factorio never appealed to me. I haven't played a single minute of it despite the fact I know I'd be good at it.
You may be engineering your own solution, but it's still the solution to someone else's problem. When you win, it's an empty feeling.
With respect to sandbox games, games like Minecraft truly offer you unlimited freedom. Minecraft is completely open. You get dropped into a new world with no instructions and no goals. The only problems are your own, and so your solutions feel like your own. Your victories feel like your own. Your defeats feel like your own. You feel like you're in another world, not working overtime at your desk solving problems.
With respect to other genres, look for something between challenge and wonder. Find games which are made with 100% love no matter the complexity or fidelity. Each level, take in everything you see and think about how someone laboriously designed every art asset you see, every system you use, every character, dialogue, level chunk, etc.
Take in these games as the massive, collaborative works of art that they are. When you're playing them, you're setting aside time in your week to become a receptacle for someone else's vision. A patron of their art.
Find games which you're still thinking about months after you've beaten them. Find games which have dead simple mechanics and are designed around short bursts of focused, intense gameplay, with which you can spend the next few years of your life slowly and methodically honing your skills in the small gaps between important engagements.
Play old games. Don't just play the latest and greatest. Video games are only half a century old, it's still possible to play many of the bonafide classics without devoting your life to it. You'll find more engaging and rewarding gameplay with the simple, but focused systems older games employ. You'll find joy in the way that the game's artists were able to create their vision with only a 320×200 resolution and 256-color palette, or only a couple thousand polygons.
In short, avoid modern AAA games like the plague. Just like the monstrosity that is the modern Hollywood scene or pop radio culture, AAA games have become an engine which sucks players out of all the money it can.
If you're not into false gameplay, addictive elements like loot boxes and micro-transactions in the face of extreme grinding, that doesn't mean you're not still into games.
> You may be engineering your own solution, but it's still the solution to someone else's problem. When you win, it's an empty feeling.
Speaking very personally... you might be playing sandbox games wrong: forget their goals. A while back, I decided that Factorio is Turing complete, even without the luxury of combiners... and I'm partway through an implementation of Eratosthenes' sieve? Rather than efficiency spreadsheets, I draw state diagrams :) Also inserters have nasty quirks that really make things fun
I have the same problem with pure sandbox games like Minecraft that I have with engineering games like Factorio. They're close enough to being simulations of the real thing (you can't argue that living on this planet isn't a - sometimes literal - sandbox!) that pretty soon I realise I might as well be putting the same effort into real life and getting tangible rewards.
Factorio nominally has an endgame "goal" (even completing it does not end the game) but it can be entirely ignored, and you are free to set whatever goals you feel like.
You may be engineering your own solution, but it's still the solution to someone else's problem. When you win, it's an empty feeling.
With respect to sandbox games, games like Minecraft truly offer you unlimited freedom. Minecraft is completely open. You get dropped into a new world with no instructions and no goals. The only problems are your own, and so your solutions feel like your own. Your victories feel like your own. Your defeats feel like your own. You feel like you're in another world, not working overtime at your desk solving problems.
With respect to other genres, look for something between challenge and wonder. Find games which are made with 100% love no matter the complexity or fidelity. Each level, take in everything you see and think about how someone laboriously designed every art asset you see, every system you use, every character, dialogue, level chunk, etc.
Take in these games as the massive, collaborative works of art that they are. When you're playing them, you're setting aside time in your week to become a receptacle for someone else's vision. A patron of their art.
Find games which you're still thinking about months after you've beaten them. Find games which have dead simple mechanics and are designed around short bursts of focused, intense gameplay, with which you can spend the next few years of your life slowly and methodically honing your skills in the small gaps between important engagements.
Play old games. Don't just play the latest and greatest. Video games are only half a century old, it's still possible to play many of the bonafide classics without devoting your life to it. You'll find more engaging and rewarding gameplay with the simple, but focused systems older games employ. You'll find joy in the way that the game's artists were able to create their vision with only a 320×200 resolution and 256-color palette, or only a couple thousand polygons.
In short, avoid modern AAA games like the plague. Just like the monstrosity that is the modern Hollywood scene or pop radio culture, AAA games have become an engine which sucks players out of all the money it can.
If you're not into false gameplay, addictive elements like loot boxes and micro-transactions in the face of extreme grinding, that doesn't mean you're not still into games.