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!