Backhand of Justice

 Why is this guy so angry? Because he just realized he needs to grind gold to repair his equipment. I frequently associate grinding in videogames with RPGs and endlessly repeating some tedious task so that I can move on to the ‘real content.’ I need 600 million Gil before I can buy my airship. Only level 60 characters can fight this boss and that equates to approximately 6 weeks of killing boars 18 hours a day.

Intuitively grinding seems like a terrible game mechanic, but I’d argue that it has been mischaracterized and it’s only poorly designed grinding that is distasteful.

 Why is repetitive necessarily bad?

 Grinding is generally characterized as a repetitive task that earns resources that aid you in a different part of the game. Whether you’re earning money, experience or hunting for a certain item, it all sounds tedious. Let’s examine the elements of grinding: repetition, reward and access to content.

Repetition is not an intrinsically negative quality even though it seems to be the obvious source of boredom in grinding. Tetris? Yep, the blocks still drop down the screen and you have to fit them together. In Mario Kart you play the same courses over and over again and I played de_dust in Counterstrike about 1 hojillion times.

One hojillion times. (That's 10 x 1 billion)

 Reward? That doesn’t sound so bad

 When I played World of Warcraft, I found grinding enemies for gold and experience extremely boring, while raiding even when the dungeon was on farm status was always entertaining. So why was one activity fun and another boring regardless of whether I was grinding in the world with a group or not? When raiding, the gear you can earn IS the end result, it’s the goal of progression and this repetitive action is not just a means to an end.

Grinding for money, on the other hand, is an intermediate step. It feels depressing because we’re conditioned to see these gateways as inconveniences where if we could only get past them we could enjoy the real game. Nobody likes to have their time wasted and we’d rather not play a game just to get past the velvet rope at the door.

 Does grinding need a makeover?

 What if you made a really fun but simple game like bejeweled, then built a Final Fantasy game around it and every battle encounter was now a bejeweled puzzle? Would the battles be any less fun than bejeweled on its own? I propose that they would be. You would constantly be thinking ‘I’m trying to play Final Fantasy, don’t make me play this puzzle every time I need something, if I wanted to play Bejeweled I know where the icon is on my desktop.’

You can play this in WoW. Unfortunately it's not as lucrative as murdering boars

The negative connotations associated with grinding are due to our expectations rather than anything intrinsically wrong with the activities. Grinding simply needs some tweaking and a makeover as even the word itself gives the impression of monotony.

 What can be done?

 What are the problems we’re trying to solve? We need to extend the length between story segments of a game without forcing the player to plod through the same boring event over and over for little reward. The key to making grinding fun is to make it not just an intermediate step, but also an end in itself.

Grinding for money and experience all gives you power within the context of the ‘main’ game. Grinding for cards that help in a card mini-game, where all enemies can drop the most powerful cards, makes the grind feel like it has tangible rewards that are separate from the grind, and that the activity is an end in itself and not just an elaborate doorman.

 I’m interested in your thoughts on the matter. Hit up the comments!