Wether grinding is the "whole" of the game or not, it is what most people do the majority of the time.

Reply

Sirlin from Sirlin.net, a long time gaming professional, as it were, wrote an article for Gamasutra in a much similar fashion. Much like your article I disagreed with it, but here it is, nevertheless.

He called it "World of Warcraft teaches the wrong things" and had a similar scathing view of 'the grind.'

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060224/qhong_01.shtml

Have a look.

Reply

Oops... that's the response...

Original article is here:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_01.shtml

(I thought the URL looked wrong :P)

Reply

There is no "grind", this whole game is nothing more than a "grind". Whether you are questing, raiding, Arena-ing, BGing, all you are doing is grinding your way to your next reward, much like life. :)

Reply

I was farming Primals for leatherworking recently, and it did occur to me that WOW employs a great deal of variable reinforcement.

I found myself on the verge of stopping after a long drought of motes and then inclined to keep going after finally getting one.

Kill quests, instances and simple XP grinding are one thing, because the reward is directly tied to the amount of effort you put in.

However, anything quest or task that depends on a random drop does seem somewhat akin to gambling, at least in terms of the rewards and the psychological hook.

Reply

> There is no "grind", this whole game is nothing
> more than a "grind". Whether you are questing,
> raiding, Arena-ing, BGing, all you are doing is
> grinding your way to your next reward, much like
> life. :)

Exactly! Brilliantly put. Life is a grind, with very little sense and an end. Just like the game.

Reply

While I agree with you overall, I still have to point out all the eyeless Murlocs, meatless boars and countless other low-percentage drops throughout the game that serve no other purpose than to draw out the length of time people play. Many times it seems like the drop rate on a collection quest drops as you collect them: the first two mobs drop the item, and you have to kill over a dozen to get the last one. (We call this the WoW Law of Diminishing Returns)

Reply

He sounds like the standard self-ritious artist who feels his opinion and explanations are the law.

More importantly I think he is missing the importance of the parallel the game has to life. If you have a job, you grind work to get paid/get promotions/prove you're better or capable. Once you've worked your way up the ranks of your office, you get to start making decisions, are recognized for your achievments, and so forth.

It does feed the concept of classical conditioning and the like, but does that mean it is unethical? I agree that his idea of the game being exploitive is proposterous. Blizzard (for all the complaints we throw at them) are one of the only companies that self produce games, which I believe is more a comment on their passion for their art than their desire to control the populace.

In short, Blow is just jelouse he can't make a game people like.

Reply

most people CHOOSE to grind for the majority of the time...

they may not want to, but of the many many things you can spend an hour doing in this game, grinding is what they find themselves doing mostly. The original article questions whether it is balanced enough if thats the majority choice. Why does 1hr grinding faction/rep/gold reap better rewards than 1hr spent doing anything else is the basic concept.

This isnt necassarily why i disagree with the article. I feel the article suggests that wow is bad, by using grinding as the example, by suggesting that it forces players to establish a target, work towards that target either individually or socially, and often, work to self imposed deadlines, and this is a bad thing.

Personally as a teacher in the 14-19 bracket i would love for any of my students to be able to effectivly show even one of those three abilities.

Time management and target identification are not only two very undervalued abilities not addressed in many education systems, they are also key abilities within anybody's working day, they are also frequently quoted as being a factor in the difference between successful and non successful individuals.

Two other things to bare in mind though. Firstly I get very bored grinding the same thing over and over, anybody who has killed 5 shaman and 5 ursa over and over again has better will power than I, I got bored killing, handing in, killing etc, I needed to kill the giants, then the furbolgs, then gather the meat just to get some slight variety in the whole repition (wintersaber rep), I have thought of the whole experience as zombifying.

Secondly, all of the above, like the original article, are viewpoints of an individual, based on a single persons experiences, current situation, and suppositions, this should be remembered whenever reading any blog or the comments it generates

Reply

Maybe all the kids could stop playing WoW, then, because it is unethical, and go do drugs. That would be a better use of their time, eh?

Remove video games from this article and insert automobiles, or books, or foriegn travel, or competitive sports. If it is something that you put a significant portion of your free time into, cannot any of these be considered unethical for the what-evers that keep you coming back to them?

Most of these pieces are written by someone with no experience in the activity outside the 10 or 15 minutes they spent doing "research". "See!? It now says I have reached level two and as a reward I should go to the trainer and get new skills! I knew it! It is the embodiment of all that is wrong in the world!"

Reply

More importantly... why should anybody ever be concerned about the opinions of a man who makes a game out of the shootings at columbine?

Reply

Unless Blow has an alternative to the basic MMO game play... some mysterious way you can advance and further your character without some sort of grind, he should just shut the hell up.

It is not possible to create a game on a subscription model and not have activities that require a long time to complete. That's the way it goes.

Reply

From a game developer standpoint (which he is), he is completely right. All of the gameplay aspects of WoW are a grind. The rest is just fluff that distracts you from noticing. Nothing especially hidden or wrong with it that would make it unethical though. The artistry comes from how well hidden and well timed it is.

Graphics just look pretty and make you go "ooo." You can do that with a model viewer.

Plot involves change. How many times has the marshal unmasked onyxia anyway? Furthering the plot would involve changing the world, which it doesn't.

Social? Just join a chat server.

http://znodis.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/the-daily-grind/

@4&6 On a separate note, life is more than just a grind. That's one of those sayings that really bothers me. You make meaningful choices each day which affect the entire world around you. Sure, you go to work, you get a pay check, but what you do with your day can affect more than the amount of money (rewards) and more than your personal reputation (faction). It can make someone's day better or worse. It can make someone's life better or worse.

The only people for which life is actually a grind are the people that cannot see beyond themselves.

Reply

Well said, Znodis.

Better title for this post, however: "Brave New World... of Warcraft?"

Reply

Blow reminds me of the sort who would condemn an otherwise superb restaurant because there is one item on the menu that he doesn't like. Furthermore, I have yet to find a PC action game that doesn't reward players for advancing through levels of the game with additional capabilities or provide new and improved gear for those who accomplish certain tasks as they progress through levels or zones. Diablo, Diablo II, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale and any number of other RPGs provide cash or gear rewards for successfully completing tasks. Are those games "manipulative"? Of course they are. Anyone who offers the promise of a reward to another if that other does something is manipulative.

Rep grinds in WoW appear to be distasteful to most players because they are usually boring. I think this a matter of unimaginative design. Quest chains with entertaining lore, challenging puzzles and tough fights would be far more entertaining.

Reply

I think you're simplifying his argument a little bit. It doesn't seem to me that he's on a crusade against just simply grinding.
The whole game is a grind. Raiding is the same thing as grinding. You dedicate a massive block of time and have a decent shot at getting rewarded for the time invested. That really does exploit a very basic human tendency, which is the excitement of the nearly random reward.
I also think you're taking his use of the word 'exploit' a little to seriously. People are exploited every day, but it's not always as serious as slavery or something like that. It's tough to argue that WoW doesn't use a really effective investment/reward system to creative a really addictive game...and, in my opinion, is rather exploitative.
There are games, like Guild Wars, that are relatively tread-mill free, and can be enjoyed with out a constant investment of time. Those games are less exploitative.

Reply

For all the folks who are interested in this topic, I strongly recommend that you read the work of Nick Yee (at the Daedelus Project and elsewhere) and Raph Koster (especially "A Theory of Fun"). Yee started his writing on MMORPGS with "A Virtual Skinner Box" (see http://www.nickyee.com/eqt/skinner.html ) but went on to many years of sociological and psychological research on MMORPGS.

From a psych standpoint, WoW employs both fixed and variable reinforcement; unlike many games that came before, it has very little negative reinforcement, focusing instead on positive. Corpse running and repair bills are the sole negative reinforcers in the game, as far as I can think. By mixing up the positive reinforcers, Blizzard avoids the desensitization that would otherwise occur quickly (think of how the Aldor/Scryers rep grind works: you get a fixed reinforcement of signets/marks, and a variable reinforcement of Fel Armaments/Arcane Tomes)

The players create additional reinforcement mechanisms over the built-in ones in the game, and you can certainly argue that the structure of the game encourages that -- raid groups, for example, employ numerous negative reinforcers, including verbal admonitions or abuse, shame, and exclusion. But they include positive stimuli as well, such as praise, 'esprit de corps', and celebrity. (i.e. The distinctive appearance of raid set armor is designed to make a raider obviously different from other players)

Anyway, every video game works to maintain its positive reinforcement loop as long as it can. One of the best ways is to keep players in a state of "flow", where the challenge is exactly equal to your skill (and this is, I think, what the hardcore raid guilds feel, and why they enjoy the game so much). But exploration, story-telling, social interaction, and the steady drip of gear and level upgrades all provide positive feedback loops as well.

Reply

@11
He didn't make the Columbine game. He pulled his own game, Braid, out of the competition, along with many of the other entrants when the organisers banned said Columbine game.

Secondly, why not make a game about Columbine? There are documentaries about it, in time I'm sure there will be a movie, why not a game too? The game doesn't glorify or justify the shootings in any way, in fact it's the opposite - and by placing you in the shoes of the killer it offers a disturbing insight into his mindset that argueably no other medium could offer.

Reply

Seems to me, like you guys are playing two different games and one of you isn't willing to accept the game for what it is and what it's designed to be.

Yes, you can spend your time avoiding all of the stuff that you feel is the grind if you want, and you can even mentally write it off in your mind and somehow decide that PVP isn't a grind or the Arena isn't a grind, when they both are. You can imagine that leveling isn't a grind, but it is.

Everything is, at least with any regards to acquisition of new things and new achievements in general. You can be an altaholic and somehow mentally re categorize it to not be a grind, but it just means you're not successful at the grind, not that you're not still grinding.

There was a similar sort of concept on another forum being discussed where plenty of people were discussing the lore in the game, and my understanding is that despite it being in the game and potentially being "rich" is riddled with illogical conclusions, retcons and plenty of problems in general where lore gets sacrificed to the overall gameplay. (ie: why can't blood elves and humans talk to each other any more? Lore-wise, it's nonsense. Game-wise, it trumps the "art" in a heartbeat when it doesn't work for the game.). The game is #1. The "art" in the game is nothing more than background music that you can turn off at will, and in fact most people seem to do just that.

I doubt you'll find a whole lot of people to agree that the reason they keep playing the game for 2 years is because of the awseome storyline.

Reply

Unethical?

Playing this game is and of itself an act of freewill.
One is not coerced into playing it, that is you are not made to play it at the end of a gun.

IT is a thing, things are not unethical, people are.

Now if you give it to your kids and the intended effect is for them to learn something, YOU may be unethical, the game cannot be.

Reply