The joys and horrors of the gaming grind
by Kyle Orland 
{ Aug 15th 2006 at 4:25PM }
We've all had it happen at one point or another -- a game you're obsessed with for weeks or months suddenly starts to become boring, even tiresome. Chalk it up to over-familiarity, the need for variety, diminishing returns on your time; whatever it is, there's usually a point where grinding it out for those last few bits of content starts to seem more tedious than fun.There's been some interesting discussion recently on this issue recently, specifically how it applies in massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft. On one side you have this post by Tom Coates [via Wonderland], who is a little disillusioned now that his WoW character has reached level 60. Coates finds exploring new dungeons now to be "laborious and slow" but, paradoxically, he still finds he can't put the game down. The experience has made Tom question his preconceptions about game design and look to Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for some sort of explanation.
On the other side, Liz Lawley on Terra Nova has an excellent post on why she actually craves the mindless tedium of the World of Warcraft grind. For Lawley, the grind provides a way to "relax, to clear my mind, to do something repetitive that provides visible ... and lasting evidence of my efforts." For Lawley, it's not the status of the bigger sword, but the actual process of earning that sword that provides the fun.
The issue is even further complicated by people who makes their living playing games. Julian Dibbell quit his job as a writer to devote his time becoming an item trader in Ultima Online. The chronicle of his experience -- both in his blog and a book -- reveals a slow transition from playing a game for simple amusement to a point where "the line between gameplay and career, between gameworld and society, begins to blur." After grinding out a living at it for months, Dibbell is now back to writing, which I guess shows how compelling the experience was for him.
Perhaps the best analysis of the love/hate relationship between gamer and game comes from Paul at Aeropause, who writes in an innuendo-filled post that he's breaking up with World of Warcraft. Sure it's tongue-in-cheek, but it also captures the process of moving on from a gaming obsession pretty well:
"You'll always have a place in my heart, but ... it just won't be the same as it was back in the beginning."
Read -- Tom Coates on the nature of fun
Read -- Liz Lawley in praise of the grind
Read -- Julian Dibbells Play Money blog
Read -- Josh breaks up with WoW
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
greatslack @ Aug 15th 2006 4:33PM
discussion recently on this issue recently
I think you've had a visit from the department of redundancy department
glitched @ Aug 15th 2006 4:40PM
its not just WOW and MMO's, Gran turismo is the definition of tedious work, why do i keep playin?
Derbeste @ Aug 15th 2006 4:49PM
I think why we keep playing is obvious.
I would have quit a long time ago, but there is something alluring about the unpredictability and Comradery of playing with real people.
I really do think it's that simple.
WoW is my second social life. My guild rocks. Any accomplishment, no matter how paultry, seems 10x more satisfying and gratifying when shared with someone you know and value. In fact, I'd go so far to say that contributing to the accomplishments of the those you value is even more satisfying than your own personal accomplishments in game.
Humans are unpredictable as well. No two raids are ever the same online. What was once tedious is now a laugh riot with the right people on voice chat. Human interaction is something I don't believe AI will EVER be able to truly mimic.
I guess for me....MMOs all come down to this:
It's not WHAT you do.....It's WHO you do it with.
J Ron @ Aug 15th 2006 4:50PM
What a small world, Liz Lawley was a professor of mine at RIT.
Neil @ Aug 15th 2006 5:07PM
This happens to a lot of single player games too. For instance, anyone else get this with Dead Rising? It's like a chore just to escort people from one end of the mall, past the food court, through the park, down the plaza, around the warehouse, and into the security room. All while hearing "follow me, follow me, c'mon, follow me, follow me, follow me".
D-6 @ Aug 15th 2006 5:14PM
As long as you got friends (Whether youe real-life friends or online-only friends), the experience is never dull. Unfortunately, I only ended up really enjoying playing WoW with my real-life friends; The quests I would do with random people ended up being annoying as hell (Perhaps the people vary from server to server) and was only in one guild (A non-serious one) so asking for help with instances and such was a lost cause. Anyways, so once my buddies quit, play got kind of boring, so I ended up giving up on somewhat high-leveled character (Lv. 42).
Bryan @ Aug 15th 2006 5:50PM
I found WoW to be very fun and exciting...until I reached level 40, when I was FORCED to do dungeons and raids. Thats when the game became a bit of a bore. At level 60 the game put me off, I tried doing high lvl Raids but found it was impossible unless you were in a top clan(which also turned out to be impossible to join). I reached the rank of legionaire in PvP, but with the lack of different sites to battle at this too became boring. I got my rep up to exalted with orgrimmar and revered in all others, then came time to buy another gamecard. I don't see how hard it is to JUST QUIT. I do not believe in addiction. All of my grandparents quit smoking at around age 60 after smoking there WHOLE life. Anybody who says they are addicted just doesnt have the willpower to quit.
Brian @ Aug 15th 2006 6:21PM
@Bryan
You're right. Assuming the hundreds of studies on the physiology of reward cycles in the brain and addiction are all incorrect, there's no such thing as addiction.
Anyway, I used to play hours of counterstrike every day, then I stopped for a month while I worked on a big paper... now I just can't find the drive to play anymore. I think if you're detached from that particular game long enough, you start to realize how many hundreds of hours you could've spent masturbating.
obo @ Aug 15th 2006 6:30PM
"As long as you got friends (Whether youe real-life friends or online-only friends), the experience is never dull."
The only time I play WoW with my friends, and having my friends too busy smashing their keyboards to talk is dull. The game is boring, buggy, inconsistent and poorly designed - the _only_ thing it has going for it is the one-more-level promise stretched to infinity and reinforced by the whole "But we _rely_ on you to get through ZG, if you miss we'll fail and it'll be your fault" mentality of guilding and raids.
My friends have a blast not because the game itself is fun, but because the prospect of acquiring new gear excites them. They enjoy WoW the way a gambling addict enjoys a slot machine. I get bored - I'd rather talk to them face-to-face for 15 minutes then spend 2 hours with them trying to get an epic item in a game that won't exist five years from now, even though my friends will still exist and will regret spending half of their 20s raiding Imaginary Land for Imaginary Thing that - whoops - no longer exists.
FSK405K @ Aug 15th 2006 8:04PM
obo, your friends will not regret using so much game time in their 20s. It will be a fond, nostalgic, experience they will be able to recall and enjoy forever. For myself it was a few games in particular where literally all of my free time during a couple of consecutive summer vacations was spent on a particular game. Oh, the memories, the fun. Part of me still looks for a lot of the same game dynamics whenever I try to get into a similar game today. Incidentally, what made the whole experience so fulfilling was the people in it, the small-size of the player population, so that all the big players knew each other. Though that's not the case in WOW, the memories of tension, surprise, achievement, and comradely remain.
Zsavior @ Aug 16th 2006 12:15AM
It is true WOW is set up to be a drug, the best example is PVP. The makers could not just make Player verse player rewards to compensate for the players who aren't in guilds. Becaue if you remember they bragged about WOW being open to everyone. But when you participate in player verse player, what ever points you accumulate only moves your rank wheter it be from corpral to major, or knight to lieutent commander, compared to the other players at the time.
So for example, if I kill 1050 players, and somebody else kills 3000 players my rank means nothing and I hardly move. On top of this if you get fed up and don't play for a week your rank rapidly decreases so you are always forced to gain 1000 plus kills every week to just keep your high rank let along advance.
I am not mentioning this to complain, I am mentioning this to show you the kind of Mindset the makers of this game want from the paying subscriber. I went to a raid in Zul Gurub which I had been to only once and got my head chopped off because I didn't know the bosses weakness, yet nobody explained anything to me. The reason is, to them it had become second nature, companies like blizz are no different that a casino with a gambling addict, they tell you one thing but really, they want you to sleep between raids, or PVP matches just to get the one piece of armor.
In the end they know that the PVP system and the raid system is a forced addictive grind, so what incentive do they set up? In the expansion, raids will only be 20-25, and PVP now your points won't decline, but how much you want to bet it will take forever to get the gear you so desperately want. Under the incentive that it will get better more will just get addicted, just to find another road block. This is why I take the game in stride. I play when I feel like, because if I didn't it would probably drive me insane.
I literally one week slept between Battle ground match ups, waiting for my turn to come up so I could score more and more points. Yet evertime I think about it the odds were horribly against me. I play for the alliance, once more I am an alliance warrior, the first fact to understand about WOW, is the piss poor player balance which means already I am at a disadvantage. All these factors come into play when you do PVP, or raids, or What the game loves more Reputation building. The Game is centered around this sort of vicious brass ring you are always reaching for, only your merry-go-round is going at a million miles per hour and sharks are shooting freaking lasers out their mouths to stop your. And you just wish Holden would open is mouth and yell "IT'S FREAKING OUT OF REACH!"
All I am tryng to convey is players must know the nature of the of the beast before they start playing WOW, or they will be devoured quickly.
Ghosty @ Aug 16th 2006 10:56AM
As a chronic UO player, I probably would have quit the game long ago were it not for all the people I've met and interact with on a daily basis. The game does get very boring sometimes, but long ago we realized UO was a chatroom that allowed you to kill stuff. Without the player interaction, I don't think anyone would have played for this long.