A Warrior in WoW Classic runs through a field, culling the same pack of boars over and over again. A Lord of the Rings Online player slaves for hours trying to scrape out their next title. A Foxhole maniac hacks away at the mines, feeding the insatiable beast of the war machine.
The massively multiplayer experience as we have come to know it is, for better or for worse, inseparable from the ever-present phantom of the “grind”. From the earliest days of the MMORPG to the genre’s tumultuous present, gamers and outside observers alike have come to associate the MMO with unavoidable repetitive sequences that usually involve the player doing the same thing repeatedly again for many hours of play.
It’s a curious phenomenon, the near universality of grinding in MMOs. So many gamers use video games as an escape from the real world, as a chance to unwind and relax after a hard day’s work. And yet, gamers across the world willingly subject themselves to what seems (at least on the surface) like a repetitive slog that eerily resembles real life at times.
How did this become the norm? What is it that keeps players hooked on games even when much of the gameplay devolves into endless mining or repetitive mob killing? And whatever it is about the grind that we love so much, is this paradigm okay? Or is such game design irresponsible on the part of MMO developers?
A brief history of the grind
In their earliest days, video games were extremely low-fidelity products that didn’t offer much in comparison to the games of today. This is hardly a knock on the game developers of the 1970s; undeniably, that they were able to create games of any substance at all with machines like the Atari 2600 that had 128 bytes of RAM is remarkable. The fact of the matter, though, was that most of the earliest video games were very repetitive. This can’t really be counted as a true grind, though, as people played these simple games for their own enjoyment. They weren’t working towards anything when they played Adventure (1980) for the umpteenth time— the idea of an interactive game was so novel that doing the same thing over and over was fun.
So what exactly counts as “grinding”? Wikipedia defines it as “the act of repeating an action or set of actions, including non-repetitive tasks to achieve a desired result at a level of certain difficulty, typically for an extended period of time.” The logical premises of this definition require that the game have some level of progression, and that there be some kind of content that is repeatable in the pursuit of a larger goal. Surely, this model of gameplay is a more contemporary invention, right?
Surprisingly, the answer might be no. Danny Paez of Inverse argues that the very first game to employ grinding was a 1975 PC game written for the PLATO educational computing system called dnd. Made by university students, dnd represented a major landmark in the history of RPGs with its inclusion of boss fights and critically, non-linear progression. As the player made their way through the dungeon, they had the option to turn back and repeat older levels in order to gain rewards. This, as the game’s developers explained in a 2012 interview with RPG Fanatic, was perhaps the first ever instance of true grinding in a game.
This concept that dnd prototyped, so Paez speculates, is what influenced future RPGs to allow and even encourage the player to repeat the same level or task over and over again to gain slow, incremental rewards. Because MMORPGs were born from the core ideas of classic RPGs, these mechanics carried over into the tradition of the former.
As gaming consoles and home computers became more powerful, though, single player RPGs became more complex and elaborate, offering more content and options for players beyond basic level grinding. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3, The Witcher 3, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are notably light on grinding due to the sheer amount of choice that players have for progression. Players in 2024 won’t tolerate bad design-driven grinding in the age of the epic $80 RPG title.
In the case of MMORPGs, the dynamic is different. Of course, the technology driving MMOs has improved dramatically in the last 25 years. But the philosophy of the players in an MMORPG is inherently competitive, even in PvE environments. There will always be players willing to work endlessly just to be better than everyone else in their shard, and who will gobble up every meticulously-built quest line or dungeon that the devs throw at them.
It makes sense, then, that grinding persists in MMORPGs, especially those with a subscription model. The desires that drive player competition incentivize developers to give players as much to do as possible— even if the activities are nothing more than killing the same boss ad nauseam. As long as enough players keep engaging with grind-heavy gameplay, it makes economic sense for MMO developers to build games that reward grinding. And in the cutthroat games industry, it’s hard to beat economics.
The Psychology of Repetitive Grinding
At its core, much of the art and science of game design is rooted in psychology. Video games are built to latch into the brains of players; to engage them and to keep them coming back. This isn’t inherently problematic, but when it comes to the vicious cycle of the grind in an MMORPG, such a dynamic between developer and player is ripe for exploitation. It is therefore worth understanding how the brain of a gamer gets locked into these kinds of cycles, especially when it threatens to eat into so much of a person’s time.
Scholarly research into the psychology of the grind is incredibly sparse. Certainly, the media has been sounding the alarm about the “addictive” nature of MMORPGs for the better part of two decades, but the actual mechanism behind this cycle, this behavioral attachment to grind games, is poorly understood.
One of the best analyses of game grinding in the context of designer-player relationships is a 2021 dissertation from Patrick Perdomo out of Malmö University, in Sweden. Perdomo indeed identifies “competition” as a major motivation for grinding on the side of the player, but he also discusses several others. Video games like MMORPGs are as much about personal achievement as they are competition. So even if a player does not care about beating others, Perdomo suggests, the very motivation of getting a new weapon, unlocking a new region, or otherwise progressing can be enough to make players grind even the stalest of gameplay.
This also ties more deeply into consumer habits. After all, an MMORPG that utilizes these motivations aggressively is more likely to be associated with player abuse. Whether or not you agree with the idea that video games can truly constitute an addiction, a 2015 study out of Norway found that over 8% of gamers have some level of “problematic” or “addictive” relationship with video games in their day-to-day lives. This backed up a 2008 Arkansas study that found intensive play of World of Warcraft in specific to be highly correlated with neurotic or highly agreeable players.
As to what all this scholarship means, it’s hard to say. Proper scientific study of game design is hard to come by, and doubtless the biggest MMO developers have their own internal methodologies and design principles to keep players engaged with the grind— even if that engagement borders on obsession.
Is this okay?
Whether you love MMORPG grinding, you hate it, or you’ve been lulled into begrudgingly appreciating it by years of devotion to the genre, it’s probably here to stay. This leaves us players with an uncomfortable question: is all this okay? Upon understanding the history and a bit of the research into the grind, reasonable people view it as an exploitative practice. Perhaps in 2024, a time of unprecedented technology, developers shouldn’t lean on grind gameplay as a crutch for keeping players engaged.
At the end of the day, MMOs (like any game) are limited in their scope. As Matt Krol points out, there is a finite amount of work that will ever be done on a given game. And so long as there are players who want the thrill of progress, the clout of being the TheLegend27 of their favorite shard, then those players will find a way to “repeat an action to achieve a desired result at a level of certain difficulty for an extended period of time.”
