Grinding (video Gaming) - Controversy

Controversy

While grinding's potential to cause players to stop being entertained may be seen as contradictory to good game design, it has been justified in several different ways. The first explanation is that it helps ensure a level playing field. According to the Pareto principle, players with better aim, faster reactions, or more extensive tactical knowledge will quickly dominate the entire game, frustrating the now-powerless vast majority. By creating a direct correlation between in-game power and time spent grinding, every player has the potential to reach the top 20% (although the Pareto principle will still apply to the amount of time spent grinding).

The problem may not be that talent and skill are rewarded, but that the rewards are based on relative talent and skill. If only the top 20% of a game's players are rewarded, 80% must be receiving little reward, even if objectively they are highly talented. If there is no hope in the future of these players being rewarded, they will likely leave the game, causing the population to shrink, and thus reducing the number of people who can be in the top 20%. Grinding has the benefit that, although only 20% of the population may be rewarded at any given time, 100% of the population will have the potential to be rewarded in the future, and will have no reason to quit. Raph Koster also addressed this issue, explaining that "... the average user is below average — meaning, the median user lies below the mean on the win-loss curve, because the win-loss curve turns out to be a power-law distribution."

Though grinding is used to provide a "level playing field", this effect could be achieved with any time-consuming behavior that is accessible to all and provides game advancement; The behavior need not be tedious or repetitive, as the term grinding generally implies. For example, in a game where advancement is gained by killing monsters, the game could provide such a huge variety of monsters and environments that no two kills are ever the same. As long as all players remained equally capable of killing the monsters, the same leveling-off effect would be generated. Thus, the "level playing field" effect is considered by some to be a misleading attempt to hide the real reason for grinding: unwillingness to budget sufficient content resources to produce a varied game.

Another alternative to grinding is to remove designer-defined objectives, leaving players free to do whatever they want. This creates a new problem where many players might be confused about what they are supposed to do, or they might lack the motivation to do much of anything in the virtual world. To reflect these different playing objectives (or lack thereof), an open-ended game of this style, such as The Sims, is sometimes called a "software toy."

Players of subscription-based online games often criticize grinds as a heavy-handed attempt to gain profit. The most interesting and challenging gameplay is often only available to characters at the highest levels, who are those strong enough to participate in raids or player versus player combat. Grinding is seen as a reason to increase the amount of time it takes to reach these levels, forcing the player to pay more subscription fees along the way. An example of this kind of MMORPG is RuneScape, which requires players to spend extensive time to achieve the highest level. Some games have made the skills available unstable and largely luck-based. While a refreshing change, this slight variance from the norm has been a source of frustration among many players that worked hard on gaining the levels through grinding.

The IGDA Online Games Special Interest Group has noted that level treadmills are part of the addictive quality of MMORPGs that caters to those who play more than 25 hours a week (hardcore gamers). Another criticism of the entire leveling concept and level playing field approach is that it often allows the player to avoid difficult strategic or reflexive challenges that one might encounter when fighting a powerful opponent challenges. By spending a large amount of time battling weaker or easily defeated characters (a practice known as bottomfeeding), players can gain levels so as to have little difficulty vanquishing the more difficult enemy. In contrast, enthusiasts of the genre have objected to the term grind as an oversimplification of MMO gameplay. They argue that, like traditional role-playing games, there is no goal in MMORPGs other than to enjoy the experience. However, some would argue that in traditional RPGs, players play to act out their character as well; in fact, some players deliberately create weak characters because they find them interesting to play.

It has also been observed that intense grinding can actively damage the role-playing aspect of a game by making nonsense of the simulated world. A classic example of this occurred in Star Wars Galaxies, where skills were improved by using them. It was therefore possible to see groups of three people, in which: one person was repeatedly deliberately falling over, taking a small amount of damage each time; another person was healing the first, increasing one's healing skill, and taking "stress" damage oneself; a third person was dancing for the other, relieving their "stress" damage and increasing their dancing skill. Star Wars Galaxies later revised the skill system with a sweeping overhaul called the New Game Experience (NGE). A number of players left the game afterwards, claiming that NGE made the game simplistic.