Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
In defense of grinding
From Wikipedia:
Grinding is a term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive and/or boring tasks not pertaining to the story line of the game. The most common usage is in the context of MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft, Tibia, Lineage and Dragon Quest IX in which it is often necessary for a character to repeatedly kill AI-controlled monsters, using basically the same strategy over again to advance their character level to be able to access newer content.
It’s not unusual to hear someone using the term grinding in a pejorative sense. The implication is that killing fifty furbolgs is not an interesting or particularly useful way to spend one’s evening. I would counter that ridding the virtual world of fifty furbolgs makes that world a better place, at least for the fraction of a minute it takes for those furbolgs to respawn (randy bastards that they are), and thus good for one’s virtual soul.
Some critics argue that grinding reflects laziness and/or a failure of imagination on the part of the game designers. I disagree. I feel that I’m closest to an otherworldly in-game experience when I’m grinding, since grinding is so much like real life. Quest-design, now THAT is where laziness and failure of imagination plays a huge role. Escort quests drive me nuts, particularly when the NPC* I am escorting purposefully blunders into enemies, can’t or won’t defend himself, and has next-to-nothing in the way of hit points. For example, I’m currently stuck on an escort quest in the game Bully, wherein I play an obnoxious punk who would sooner head-butt, melvin, and wet-willy you than ask you for help on his algebra homework. He has to escort one of the chubby nerds from the library to a bathroom. Easy, right? Wrong. There’s a timer, so if you don’t do it fast enough, the nerd will wet himself. And it seems like every other bully at school wants a piece of him, so you have to fight off something like five other guys to get your nerd to the bathroom. The nerd has zilch in the way of hit points, and the bullies all target him, not me.
I haven’t succeeded yet. He keeps getting knocked out, or he wets himself, or both, and then I’m time-warped back to the library and we have to do it all over again. I’m not sure if I’m trapped in his hell or he’s trapped in mine, but it’s not fun.
And then there are the countless World of Warcraft quests that involve killing X number of (fill in name of beast here) to recover Y number of (body parts). You would think killing one zhevra (think zebra) would yield four hooves. Strangely no. Killing named NPCs, destroying plans, lighting signal fires etc. are all variants of this quest type. Quests that are neither escort quests nor “do this action X times” are few and far between.
Grinding, however — that’s honest work. Sometimes a guy wants to nothing more than snipe furbolgs all night long, you know?
D.
*Non-player character, AKA “meat” or “wand-fodder.”
