The Grind (2)

Let's refocus a bit. When people talk about grind, it's actually a shortcut for referring to the constant leveling loop, present in most MMO or Japanese RPGs, in action RPGs, in virtually anything where your progress is measured by numbers that increase little by little. You do repetitive actions to improve your character stats. To get better.

Wait. Performing repetitive actions to get better? That sounds an awful lot like training. I can spend hours hitting a ball against a wall by myself to improve my squash skills. Pianists perform endless boring exercises to strengthen their fingers or polish their technique. Speakers perform exercises in front of the mirror. Starcraft players have even created training maps just to work on the precision and dexterity required by the game.
However, none of this is ever referred to as grinding.

Why is that so? What is the difference between training and grinding?

When you grind, you don't learn anything. Your character improves, but you, as a person, do not evolve. The moment you're finally able to perform a music piece that seemed out of reach a year before is exhilarating. Nothing beats the feeling of improving, and seeing the results of your training.

However, both are a manifestation of the same thing: dedication. The will to get better, and the ability to pour efforts into that.
Casual sportsmen / musicians / <insert your passion> don't do this kind of boring exercises. They just want to enjoy their hobby. In the exact same way that someone who is not invested in the game will not enjoy the grinding time. For people who do undertake the grind, it becomes a measure of their progress, and each additional level or piece of item becomes a badge of honor (which is also why the "pay-to-win" games are shunned by those very hardcore players, since the grind can be eased with money).

And it teaches something valuable: patience, and dedication. In real life, not all tasks will be interesting, or as fulfilling as beating the final boss of your favorite game. People who have embraced the grind... Is it just me, or is this starting to sound like some kind of religion? Anyway... People who have embraced the grind instinctively try to optimize all the repetitive tasks they have at hand, or find a way to remove them entirely. When I have some boring stuff to do that I can't automate, I have got into the habit of decomposing it into smaller tasks, doing them in the proper order, and measuring my progress against those. I don't think about it anymore, and it helps keep the boredom out of it, thus finishing earlier.

I don't think that grinding should be part of every game. But players have "endured" it for a long time in many of the most popular games ever for a reason. It gives them the opportunity to be among the best, without being limited by their reflexes or real-world abilities. With enough dedication, they can climb to the top.

But maybe it does not need to be as "boring" as it is today. Maybe we can work to make it appear as a reward rather than an imposed step before the interesting part. It won't be easy, but at least it's worth a try :)

The Grind

According to Wikipedia, grinding is "the process of engaging in repetitive tasks during video games". It is often seen as being tedious, uninteresting, or boring, something you have to do to get access to the next piece of interesting content. 

The thing is, some people actually like the grinding part. I don't mind spending hours leveling up my Diablo 3 wizard while watching series; it actually helps me relax, and lets my mind wander (which results in crazy projects like building a hack'n'slash game for smartphones). I enjoyed the Civilization endgames, which are arguably nothing more than rolling over all your opponents without much thinking. And I found myself powerful when I repeated my perfect sequence of attacks during 20 minutes when destroying Final Fantasy VII's powerful Emerald Weapon.

To me, all of the above are grinding activities. They are repetitive and they don't involve much thought or skill to execute, and can be boring (what's the point in continuing a game you're sure to win?). But there is a clear difference of perception between the "level grinding" of Diablo or <insert your favorite MMORPG> and the other two. Why is this?

 

  First, the reason of why you grind, and what you expect to achieve by this, are completely different.
In Diablo or World of Warcraft, you grind to get to the last stage of the game, to access what is usually called the end-game content. Grinding is thus seen as a mandatory gate before being able to enjoy the real game.
In Civ or FFVII, the grind is the culmination of all your past efforts. It's the reward. You planned and executed and beautiful strategy which left you with half of the map under your control. Enjoy the moment while you grind your final opponents to dust! Or you found a clever combination of materias, or poured efforts into grinding your party to the maximum level, which made the execution of one of the toughest bosses in the game a breeze. 

But in the latter case, the grind is seen as a reward for the efforts you poured into the game. If you were cruising through the game from the very beginning, the endgame would not feel special at all, and would actually be boring. The grind needs to feel like it's something you earned, rather than something you have to go through. 


And this difference is all the more accentuated by the duration of the grind. Leveling in Diablo can take several hundreds of hours. A Civ endgame is a couple of hours at most. Past a certain point, it goes from reward to burden, especially if you need to go through it to unlock additional content. 

This article is actually starting to get much longer than I expected, so I'll stop there for the time being. Stay tuned for the second part!

Making failure fun

There are countless posts about making failure fun, and why it is important. Failure is part of the challenge - if you never fail, there is no challenge, and excitement comes with overcoming challenges.

But the main issue with failing is when you feel like you're not progressing. Failing is part of learning. I died more than 200 times to get the last star in Mario Galaxy 2, but that was ok. I felt like I was getting better, I could clear some passages without thinking after a while. And when I finally got it, I felt like I was a champion.
In other styles of games, your character progression is the main indicator of how strong you are. In modern RPGs, being beaten by an enemy doesn't necessarily mean you lose all the experience you have earned until then, or the items you have looted. When you die in Diablo 3, you lose time (and a bit of gold). You have no experience or item penalty.
However, it isn't exactly fun to fail in all these cases. What's fun is the feeling of progress, not the failure itself. The usual reaction in these cases is frustration at having to start yet another time. Easier said than done however.

What I'm considering doing randomly triggering a kind of "berserker mode" upon death. Instead of immediately dying, the player has a chance to become invulnerable, with increased powers, for a short period of time, before ultimately dying. It could then even become a kind of skill to be improved - it needs to be carefully balanced though, because strategies that revolve around dying could not only be counter to the general playing goals (defeating monsters without being defeated), but also frustrating for the player; even if it's fun, no one prefers dying repeatedly over simply bashing the monsters away.
The "random" aspect is important too. It gives the berserker mode a special feel to it. Or maybe it could be triggered every time, and randomly have special powers. It is still all only ideas, upon which I will iterate.

What do you think? Are you aware of other games that made failure fun? How do they do it?