Back to the grindstone

I wrote last on how grinding had been used in Overlord as a forgiving mechanic that penalized poor performance while creating a diegetically plausible vector for the player to get back in the game. I found it well implemented. I don’t usually find it done so, and MMOGs I find particularly bad for this.

Liz Lawley has written on the pleasures of grinding and I, too, use it this way. I even weed my lawn as she described – crawling on hands-and-knees, tugging root structures from the soil – with the same satisfaction described. In spring, I attack snow banks in the same way with the same pleasure. Ask me how I spent my weekend, trusty ice-scraper in hand, laying waste to the… ANYWAY, YES, I’m a GRINDER. And I grind in games for mindless pleasure.

My problem is that I have found the MMOGs I have played to be largely an exercise in grinding (I’m aware of what this perhaps says about my relative ability at playing them). Both in WoW and CoX, grinding occurred as solo- and group-play activities. I would solo grind if I just wanted to play a little and didn’t want to go through the effort of partying up for quests, or grind while I was waiting for a party to form/arrive, or while in queue for a respawn (don’t get me started on this). As I recall, I also spent a fair amount of time in Feralas grinding for some ultra-rare drop to make my [Robe of the Void] – an item I desired because I was predominantly a solo player and wasn’t going to get into guild-play enough to raid, nor PvP enough to qualify for that gear. Grinding leading to more grinding.

Sometimes group play turned into a goal-less activity wreaking a path of destruction that, while profitable, quickly ceased to be fun. I believe this was caused by a collapse of group purpose. With all nearby quests completed, no new goal established, no group cohesion beyond immediate questing, and no normative behaviours for establishing new goals, the party carried on with inertia but no object. There seemed to be a hesitancy on the part of party members - myself included - to strongly put forth new direction, a behaviour that I think would have been welcomed from the party leader if only so members could make a clear decision regarding whether they would remain partied for that or not. After a time, one member would say “I have to log” and the party would dissolve moments later.

That play can become grinding would not be such a problem if the combat itself didn’t feel so much like button pressing and timer-minding. I have no affection at all for jRPGs like Final Fantasy and their administrative play. What I find, though, is that western-RPG-style MMOGs seem to be built that way, too. I suppose there is an optimal way to handle every situation and, were I more spreadsheet-oriented, I could tweak my play to use every one of my character’s more obscure abilities to hone my play for every situation. But I’m not, and tend to find that I use the same two or three abilities in the same order with the same timing for almost every combat situation. And the only action really available in those worlds is combat, so the game quickly becomes an assembly line with a weak narrative; a treadmill. Play only really shines during group play when too much is going on for things to be rote, when people really hold their party roles and keep things from tilting over to disaster against all odds. At those moments it’s a furiously paced team sport tied to a loot table set inside a social spectacle. Without that team action, it’s bouncing a ball against a wall tied to a loot table, etc. Despite the storylines, and quests and conventions, I really can’t take it at all seriously as narrative gaming.