Game Design Essay: The Nature of Grinding
Q: What is grinding?
A: I define grinding as repeating a single task until it gets boring.
Q: If it’s boring, why is grinding necessary?
A: There are two reasons. One, gaming as submission (1). Two, grinding lets games have a ramping power level. You get stronger when you grind.
Q: Why do games need a ramping power level?
A: It’s illustrated in a game design concept called “flow.” Players are constantly evolving when they’re playing games: they’re getting better as they learn new mechanics and master old ones. So if the game’s difficulty level doesn’t change, the player will quickly become too good and the game will be boring. The game’s difficulty needs to rise along with the player’s power level. Consequentially, if the game is too hard and the player hasn’t yet acquired the skills to properly react, it becomes frustrating to play. Flow is how games maintain a balance between “boring” and “frustrating” by scaling the difficulty with the player’s power level.
Q: So if flow is meant to prevent games from being boring, and grinding is meant to make flow happen, then why is grinding boring?
A: … Good question.
Well-designed video games find an answer to that last question. Mediocre video games never make it to the third question: they just assume that ramping power levels are a good thing. Bad video games never bother to question what grinding exactly is and just stuff it into their game.
Grinding happens because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what flow is. It’s when designers mistake “player skill level” for “character skill level,” as in the character that the player is controlling. That might seem like a small difference, but it’s not. Not at all.
Player Skill Versus Character Skill
“Player skill” refers to the growth that the human player holding the controls goes through while playing the game. Things like reaction speed, dexterity, hand-eye coordination, predicting enemy movements, estimating the flight arc of a thrown grenade, and bluffing are all player skill. Think of it as the skills that stay with the player even after leaving the game. On the other hand, “character skill” is all about the systematic numbers behind the player’s character. Leveling up, finding health upgrades, and equipping a stronger weapon are all cases of character skill.
Flow is all about player skill. Character skill is only relevant if it applies to player skill. Straight numbers have no place in flow, and that’s where the problem of grinding lies. It’s what happens when you try to artificially create flow using character skill rather than player skill.
Still, it’s not easy to differentiate between “player skill” and “character skill.” Don’t they play off each other? If you had a character who attacks once per second for two damage, and another character who attacks twice per second for one damage each, wouldn’t you play them differently? There’s a whole grey zone in between those two types of skills, but for the sake of clarifying the differentiation we can look at the polar opposites, the genre that epitomizes player skill versus the genre that epitomizes character skill. Those two genres, in my opinion, are fighting games and RPGs respectively
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Players of fighting games have to go through many, many steps before being able to experience the game as it was meant to be played. First, there’s learning the controls and combos. Then there are different characters, each with unique playstyles. After that, you start getting into the nitty-gritty details of block frames and dodge frames and how all the underlying mechanics work. And throughout this whole process, a player has to be honing his physical dexterity to play the game in the first place: it took me like an hour of practice until I could execute Ryu Hayabusa’s Izuna Drop attack in Dead or Alive 3. Finally, after all this learning, the player gets to the stage of “yomi,” the part where the game revolves around predicting and countering enemy movements (3).
Beginner players of a fighting game can’t possibly afford to spend concentration on yomi, because they need that concentration for controller dexterity and character-specific combos. Fighting games are notorious for their immensely high skill floor and how difficult it is to get into that world. Of course, the tradeoff is that player growth has immense potential, high enough for professional fighting game players to make a living. That whole journey from beginner to pro, from learning the controls to manipulating yomi is all player skill. But the characters themselves never changed one bit.
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On the other hand, traditional RPGs have a low player skill ceiling (4). These games consist of turn-based combat and selecting actions from a menu. How much better can you get at selecting “Fire” under the “Magic” section? Difficulty in RPGs is measured numerically: levels, statistics, health, damage output, etc. When you’re facing off against a difficult boss in a traditional RPG, you defeat it by fighting other monsters until your in-game characters grow stronger. But you as a player aren’t actually growing at all: your talents aren’t rising, because there isn’t anywhere for them to rise. Maybe you’re getting a little faster at selecting options from menus, but that’s about it.
With this in mind, it’s no wonder that pure dedicated fighting games rarely have leveling systems, or even numerical displays. Health in fighting games is often represented by bars: it’s rare to see it represented by numbers as is so common among RPGs. Branching off that train of thought, professional RPG players will probably never be a thing with how low the skill ceiling is. RPGs don’t actually drive the player to greater skill levels: they drive the characters that the player controls to greater skill levels. There’s no player growth happening, but compare a hardcore Final Fantasy Tactics player’s team to a complete beginner’s.
Now that we’ve established fighting games as being primarily player skill and RPGs as being primarily character skill, we can look at each genre’s approach to grinding. It’s not a deep analysis: fighting games have little to no grinding, and RPGs have a ton of it. But there are more genres than those two, so we’ll need to take a look at a wider spectrum of games. I’ll be adding my opinion on which skill type each game focuses on, and how that ties into the gameplay. Keep this question in mind: how would you approach a difficult boss in each of these titles? Would you vary up your tactics and hone your player skills, or would you retreat and grind on monsters to increase your character skills?
(....)
But the important trend to notice is each game’s relationship to grinding. When a game focuses on character skill, it tends to lean towards grinding.
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What Does Each Kind Of Skill Do?
Emphasis on character skill causes grinding. When a game focuses on character skill, it becomes all about the end result. You fight battles so your character levels up and becomes stronger. It’s like a Skinner box: you’re going through a boring process so you can get a reward in the end. A video game should not be a boring process.
On the other hand, when a game focuses on player skill, the journey becomes the goal. You fight battles because it’s fun to fight battles, not because you want a reward at the end. Think about it this way: when you reach maximum character skill (the level cap) in a game, do you still continue to play it? Look at the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series. You gain experience by playing, but you have an option to reset all your experience and start again from scratch. Go to Maplestory and ask any high-leveled player if they’d like to reset all their experience and start again from scratch. There’s no way it would be okay in Maplestory: having your account hacked and losing all your items is considered traumatic enough. But everyone does it in CoD: MW. It’s because the action of playing CoD: MW and shooting people’s faces is intrinsically fun, and restarting lets you play the game more. But in Maplestory, you’re playing the game only for the reward, rather than because it’s fun (7). It’s not fun: if it weren’t for the leveling system, no one would play it. Games should be fun in and of themselves rather than relying on tricks to reel players in.
Grinding and flow are like two sides of a coin. It’s the battle between the psychological trap against the paragon of good game design, represented by character skill and player skill respectively. Still, as much as I dislike grinding, I don’t want to just bash on it: it’s better to try to see both sides of the issue. What’s the good side of grinding and character-based skill?
1) Character skill is consistent. Player skill is something that requires effort to develop, while character skill is always increasing as long as you’re playing the game.
2) Character skill gives you time to master player skills
3) Character skill is satisfying. Looking back at all the effort you spent making your character as powerful as possible is satisfying. It’s like that scene in Gran Torino when Clint Eastwood is cleaning his car, and when he’s done he sits on his porch, smokes a cigarette, and just looks at the finished product. That’s just not possible with player skill. Perfectionist player types gravitate towards RPGs or other character-skill based games for this reason
CLOSING THOUGHTS
The distinction between player skill and character skill is fuzzy and unclear, but when a game’s designers sit down and try to pin down exactly what they want their title’s skill distribution to be, it results in a good video game. But when that process of considering different skill types doesn’t happen, it results in design flaws like grinding. It’s necessary for us designers to understand the pros and cons of both player skill and character skill and apply that analysis to the games we create.