Don't let the bastards grind you down

Back into Overlord for a bit and it turns out that a part of this solo-play game is grinding. The Overlord collects life force from killed creatures – soulfully glowing balls of soul – to summon minions. Your minions will kill something, sheep perhaps, corpses scattered like a butcher shop explosion in the “The Pastoral Symphony” from Fantasia. “For the masssssterr!” crow the little gremlins as they gather the orbs and hold them high over their misshapen heads in offering to you.

Have I mentioned there are parts of the game I really like?

Now, each one of these orbs lets you summon a minion up to the maximum number your skill allows. They die, you can pull new recruits through the portals so long as you have life force of the right type (some game mechanic masking as an elementalism-of-evil). Usually you gather enough life force as you proceed through the quests that you should always have enough. However, if you really bone a quest and lose too many of your imps you may need to go harvest souls.

I tend to think of grinding as an aberration-to-ideal that occurs where game mechanics intersect the realities of production. To keep a player in that oh-so-desirous flow-state, designers have to build into the game measures that adjust the difficulty to the player's skill. The goal for designers is to keep gameplay in “the zone” – that sweet spot where the game is challenging enough to be engaging while not exceeding the player’s ability to the extent that play is frustrating.

Character death ejects the player from the game, breaking the flow state, which isn’t necessarily undesirable – it depends on the type of gameplay you are trying to create and what the win state is relative to. Casual games do it all the time and the potential of losing is one of the things that makes winning pleasurable. However, in narrative games the objectives of play may be different and dying is usually a forcible ejection from the story. This can be distinctly unpleasant and destructive of the pleasure taken from the media, like having someone knock the novel from your hand or block your view of the movie screen. Narrativus interruptus.

There are other factors to consider. Skipping to the points, designers of narrative games are trying to make them:

1. easy enough to be playable
2. hard enough to be challenging
   
3. have negative outcomes for failed performance that are diegetically consistent and so do not eject the player from the story
4. fun for a broad range of player skill, experience, style, and objectives (especially important as games become high-budget, mass-market consumer commodities)
5. profitable

That fifth one is the clincher. Even if the first four are achievable, it has to be a sufficiently profitable venture to the studio to not just address but balance all those needs. In solo play games it isn't so bad; you just allow for difficulty to be adjusted and – tada – no flow problems. This can either be a manual switch or something more sophisticated that gauges how well you seem to be doing and makes adjustments automatically.

In multiplayer environments this isn’t as feasible. The game needs to equitably treat players but, as Raph Koster has pointed out in A Game Without Treadmills, “the average user is below average” and a few players will come to dominate the game.

So that’s where grinding comes in.

Grinding allows designers to build games that serve the needs of skilled, experienced gamers while dumbing it down for the rest of us at a cost to them that leaves some profit in it for the company.

Let’s be clear – grinding is not the same as practice. When a player practices, they increase their skill at an action. You don’t grind in Quake: Arena. You either make the shot or you don’t. If you’re not skilled enough to play with the big kids and that bugs you, practice until you're a gunslinger or don’t play with them. Simple. That, or you don’t play with anyone, commit to single-player and set the AI to “mouth breather”.

In narrative games the player is usually connected to the game world through a character that is read with a narrative filter by the game. That is, the game understands the player as a character in the story who is growing in skill even if the player is not, or not at the same rate as the character relative to the world. As a guide to recognizing these kinds of worlds: it is probably a MMORPG, there are character levels/experience points/skill points, and POV is probably third person.

A gamer that has the skill to play the game well should experience the smoothest flow through the content. A player a little short on skill can appreciate design that allows them to recover and continue playing without experiencing the full cost of play failure until they gain in skill (or don’t, and they just factor it in as part of the gameplay). It lets them stay in flow longer. A very poor player may be ejected from the story as the tale becomes one, not of questing, but of failing quests and farming for the ability to attempt and fail again. Either this player will leave the game or will ploddingly grind their way to the highest levels.

So back to my experience with the grinding in Overlord; I boned a quest and was down to my last few life force for summoning “reds” (ranged DPS-type minions, immune to fire). Not knowing if reds would be valuable in the next quest or if there were a source of red life force there, I didn’t feel comfortable starting the next quest without replenishing my stock – I needed to go grind for more. And the grind mechanic – used here – was forgiving. I could do that; it was a fair price for my shoddy performance on the aforementioned boned-quest. Oddly, though, it also helped to ground me in the game world. “I know where I can get those,” I thought to myself, remembering the area where the firebeetles lived. It wasn’t far away and I knew how to get there. This knowledge was strangely comforting to me in this world where I struggled to get my bearings. Perhaps the source of my jolt of pleasure was a bit of Stockholm Syndrome but, regardless, it was an example of the successful use of a too-often-poorly used mechanic as a novel technique to correct for player skill level, and in a place I didn’t expect to find it.