[MUD-Dev] Why do smart people grind?

[ceo]

1. Because you want to play a game, and a game requires challenge,
and there's nothing challenging about solving mind-numbingly boring
problems. Mind-numbing can be achieved several ways:

   overly simplistic

      (e.g."type the numbers 1 to 100 in reverse order")

   highly repetitive

      (e.g. a sliding-puzzle, like the one most of us have played
      hundreds or thousands of times before in our youth, hence this
      has no interest to us)

   overly complex

      (e.g. "you have 150 levers, and you have to get them into the
      right combination using feedback that is delayed 7 moves from
      when it occurred [ARGGHG!]")

You want to be a powerful butt-kicking warrior, or a fancy-pants
mage, but you know that just entering a game and immediately being
God is no fun at all (although perhaps you don't understand why).

Obviously, you can't (mainly) be put through physical pain, nor be
required to spend 50 years of your life building up skills, or spend
hours pumping iron. But...you can be forced to grind, which has a
lot in common with those things. You can suffer for the advancement
of your character, be forced to make real-life sacrifices (time) of
a variable magnitude in order to advance your character ("according
to commitment" you might say - in comparison to the financial cost,
$10 a month, which is "a level playing field").

So. Perhaps level-grind is the hardship we willingly submit to in
order to feel we've achieved something. I don't know about you, but
when I sat back and looked at my level 50-something characters I
certainly felt achievement - and it had nothing to do with
discovering new lands (each of which could have had a sign like:
"Welcome to the Lost Plains. You are visitor number 45,736"). Nor
did it have anything to do with strategy, as confirmed by looking at
some of the painfully stupid people who were at a similar level, yet
appeared quite genuinely to have played their way to that point. Nor
even did I feel an accomplishment of skill; the players I'd trod on
on my way up had been mere minor diversions - to be honest, I can't
say I could even remember a single thing about more than one or two
of them (there were a few that were truly special, for instance the
Diablo2 Sorceress of a much hgiher level who challenged me to a
duel, clearly aiming to freeze me and then kill me at her leisure,
with me screaming "no fair"; only, I happened to have a very rare
belt of "invulnerability to freezing", and guessed the scam, so
accepted - and she died quickly, smugness flowing to disbelief and
then rapidly to vicious curses...Another griefer griefed :D).

But I certainly felt proud that I'd stuck with it all that way -
that was an achievement in itself. I'd learnt and re-learnt tactics
for each scenario to maximise my levelling speed, and demonstrated
at least some skill in reducing the interminable boredom of
levelling to the least boring as possible (but still enough to make
one miserable), and carefully paced the addictiveness, so that I was
able to keep playing and *actually enjoying it* whilst knowing,
really, that I was doing something pointless, unchallenging, and
dull.

Just a thought.

Adam M
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev