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[Graham-]

I see. I did not know these things. I know only a few WoW players.

Normally I define "grind" as something that happens without interesting choices along the way, for some long-term reward. I suppose there can be grinds and ultra-grinds.

Also, "interesting" is a subjective term here.

[Graham-]

I'm going to go back to the heart of the matter. I am playing Zenonia 4 on my Android right now, listening to a gaming podcast. It is a grind-heavy action-JRPG. Though the "J" may be slight....

The thing with completing quests is that I know what to do. Obviously when a game manipulates you into forming a destructive habit - the way a drug can - that's bad. So players should have fun in the minute-to-minute experience. But, I think this idea of games being oriented towards long-term play vs short-term is a product of the times. Eventually everything will have both. Look at RPG mechanics making their way into everything, poorly.

The essence of achieving depth in an experience - "engagement" - is in providing a stream of content that is somehow different from one moment to the next, but is somehow connected to itself in as many ways as possible. So if I want to engage in Go, or Poker, or Dark Souls, I need to feel the monotony stripped away. In all 3 of those games the attraction is in the depth of the experience. Serious poker players play for the love of the game, or the income. The short-term wins are just a target to hit, so that the depth of the experience might be unlocked.

Dark Souls leads you by the ear to challenges that paint a portrait of some world, with monster designs, and music. What you really want to do, as a player, is beat challenges. If those challenges were loosely arranged then Dark Souls would not be as much fun. Surely we want to get better, but the reason Chess is played not nearly as prolifically as it used to be is because its challenge curve is not easily approached. Dark Souls leads you around its system with its story, and leveling.

Even Mario presses your skills in new directions with each level. All of your moves were available from the beginning, mostly, but you weren't forced to use them until the progression forced you to. Being goal-oriented, even in life, is literally a way to force yourself to understand what you are currently doing. I pay more attention to my action skills in Mario because I want to be good enough to tackle the next world. Games should intricately link their short-term experiences with their long-term ones. There is always a best harmony between them.

There can be a thematic harmony between long-term and short-term too.

[Muz]

I've played games like WoW and Evony before. An early look at it and all you see is the shallow mechanics. The shallow mechanics appeal to people who 'don't have time to pick up games', but they can be surprisingly complex. The simplicity give room for social emergence - a large part of these games are the politics, clans, and alliances.

The mechanics are not even that shallow. Because they're easy to get into, a hardcore player can manipulate the system. Everyone knows how to play Farmville. In later stages, the game gives you too many options. A hardcore player would open up a spreadsheet, decide how much profit he's getting from his cows and blueberries, the ROI, the ones that return faster XP so that he could jump to a higher level which earns much better profits.

If someone made Farmville competitive, people would be logging on from work every 10 minutes and planting 2 hour plants for those times when they have a meeting on. The game is not in the click. The game is in getting to your computer at the right times, being more punctual than your opponents.

Now convert this into alliances with rankings and competitions. You have a lot of alliance members who are completely inept at the game and are still clicking their strawberries. You, the elite hardcore player, knows the right farm builds for your 4 hour switches and know that the cantaloupes are deceptively poor profit despite the high prices (and high cost).

You have to educate your members. No matter how elite your alliance is, how simple the mechanics are, and even if you're holding interviews to entry, you'll get noobs. In fact, the simpler the mechanics are, the lower quality of recruits you'll have to sift through. This starts off with simple guides being passed around, then goes on to a mentor system, and then an authenticated forum system to prevent people from sharing guides. Alliance recruitment becomes a major focus of the metagame... depending on how it's designed, alliances build scripts to get to newbies as soon as they can be messaged or poach talented members from other alliances.

You build a greasemonkey script that monitors when your alliance mates were last online, the latest crops they planted, and sends out a SMS to people when they're 1 minute late to their crops. You figured that you've already put $20 into the game itself and start up a SMS reminder budget. You later integrate the thing into Twitter or build your own microblogging app to remind people in real time and send smartphone notifications.

Farmville is a silly example, but this is what goes on in many "casual" games. Even if it doesn't happen, it's been proposed.

tldr: They're not non-gamers. They just spend all their time on one game.

[Graham-]

The term "gamer" can be used a lot of ways. I don't think its definition matters. As long as we know what we mean.

Social drives can be a huge long-term benefit. I played counter-strike because I wanted to slaughter my opponents.

[SirNiko]

A hardcore player would open up a spreadsheet, decide how much profit he's getting from his cows and blueberries, the ROI, the ones that return faster XP so that he could jump to a higher level which earns much better profits.

This is, in a broad fashion, how Kingdom of Loathing is played at high levels. The majority of the game is just clicking nodes and getting items or xp. Combat tends to be trivial at high levels of play, as players set monster difficulty as high as it can go then kill foes with powerful combos. The developers even encourage and support greasemonkey scripts that automate huge portions of the game - there are some runs I've done where I essentially programmed most of the tasks, so I didn't even do the clicking through. I just picked a combat strategy, which zones I'd do, and my only decision making was which zones to do and when to move on (sometimes to cut a loss). It was amusing and only 'grindy' in the most technical sense, since my play for each day would be about 30 minutes of planning and only 5-10 minutes of doing.

Most people don't play it that way, though, as most people don't play farmville with a spreadsheet. While it's still technically a game if you're just goofing around clicking things and watching it like a virtual ant farm when you're out of turns or money, it's not the same level as somebody who is actively playing and trying to get better (In Kingdom of Loathing, variations on the term "coffee break game" were sometimes used in a non-pejorative way to describe the perspective of people who just wanted something fun to eat up time during breaks and didn't want to involve themselves in leaderboard quality play). I think you're right to say that "non-gamer" is the wrong term for this, but the typical person who plays farmville and no other games has significantly different interests than a person who might play Super Mario Brothers with the intent to win or a round of Starcraft against a competent opponent.

And yes, I think it's pretty easy to come up with examples of games that are fun at an atomic level and not at a high level, and visa versa. Sandbox games like Minecraft are often fun in the atomic, but unsatisfying at the high level. The majority of traditional games can be boring at the atomic level but fun at a high level, especially in the case of resource management games or RPGs that involve a lot of fiddling through menus to make choices that don't have any short term significance.

[Graham-]

I find menu work in RPGs great. If an RPG has a bad menu it is a strong sign that that RPG isn't about builds. *cough* Skyrim. The reward comes from competent execution, like swishing a jump shot. You feel good when the menu bends to your will.

Also, what, with Minecraft? I'm not a "high level" Minecraft player, but holy shit people put a lot of effort into their constructions. Many constructions take days, weeks, to complete. Troll youtube for examples. You could say Minecraft is all about spontaneously emerging long-term goals.

Though maybe I am interpreting your use of "high level" wrong here?

[Photon]

Look at RPG mechanics making their way into everything, poorly.

I've seen this used and done poorly as well. The thrill of "leveling-up" seems to present a strong sense of accomplishment when, in reality, its had minimal effect on anything. But the game said you "leveled-up," so now the player can feel good about themselves, right? You became "better"... factually so because a couple numbers or gauges ticked up a couple steps. Obviously this is a generalization and sometimes that feeling is totally valid, but sometimes it just seems like a cheap--maybe even manipulative--way of buying the player's attention and/or money.

Ultimately, it feels like a matter of restraint in broad terms. Do I need the full value meal at the fast food joint or do I just need the burger? Do I really need the 50" TV or the 40"? Do I need the Lv. 5 Hammer Smash over the Lv. 4 Hammer Smash? Or am I just going from one form of overkill to the next level of overkill? Doesn't make much difference, does it? Or maybe, even worse, its letting the player "buy out" (whether by grinding or money) the gameplay by becoming excessively strong instead of favoring brains over brawn.

[s0]

i like leveling up in games because i like the idea of my character "improving" somehow (this is not the same as "improving as a player"). i also like the idea of customizing/personalizing a character, and leveling plays into that.

[Photon]

I wasn't saying customization or leveling-up were bad. I can take to and enjoy customization done right.

I'm getting more towards trivial or broken scenarios. Do we really need a "jump height" level? Can the player "break" the game by investing solely in "attack power"? Strategy can be fantastic, but sometimes unbridled strategy can turn a fun game into a monotonous, fire-button jamming fest, in the broad sense of the term. Customization can actually turn a game into a very linear experience in my opinion when one or two stats/equips/etc. are the obvious choices. Sure, you can exercise "restraint" as mentioned earlier, but that only goes so far if the game was built and centered around exploiting certain mechanics and/or was naturally unbalanced from the get-go, right?

[Blink]

Photon, I was going to say you're getting off topic: but I actually believe you're giving a whole new layer of depth to the conversation. There's a fantastic intersection you have there, where the long term benefits can actually screw up your immediate interactions. If you know X is the most powerful upgrade and you can just spam/grind for it right from the get go, that might be all you do. Then you get X and, like you knew, it's super powered - so much that it breaks the game and makes everything boring.

I had this experience with Godfather on the Xbox 360. You could at the end of the game take over all properties and get the ultimate title. Who knew what it was, but I wanted it - so I went after it. Taking over the houses to get there got repetitious and boring, meant some strategy, but was largely not worth it. Then when I got there, the powerup was insane: infinite ammo for every weapon, own every car, some mix of ultimatums like that. But... then the game wasn't fun. Everything that posed a challenge to you was gone, and you just became a bored god in a universe that didn't challenge you. It was a really interesting (boring at the time ) experience.

If we can figure out how to give players rewards to shoot for that neither break the immediate gameplay out of insane desire for them, nor destroy the systems when we actually get them by being too powerful of rewards, then I think we have nailed the balance between desire for a long term objective and the reward of obtaining a new tool. But, that sounds hard. xD

[Photon]

Photon, I was going to say you're getting off topic

Actually, I was thinking about that and was about to make a edit because I thought the original point was getting lost (I may have gone on a little tangent all the same), but hey, you definitely picked up on the main thrust in there.

The point is that the rewards don't justify actually playing the game, either because they make the game itself irrelevant (ex: make it too easy) or because they don't really add significant depth as part of the whole picture. But the allure of power, pride or even the unknown drives you to put up with something mediocre. Even in situations where the rewards are worth it, bad lead-up gameplay isn't necessarily excused.

[Graham-]

It's difficult to make an interface, that lets the player have fun on both ends, interacting with the game directly and also having fun "on a higher level"... Menu structure and other simplifications (numbers to represent things) are required to make the game world more accessible for the brain, and also to make complex interaction with it easily possible.

(Maybe it would be possible to replace menu interaction in RPGs (I frankly don't have much experience with) or "editor-like view" of strategy games by realtime actions. ....

So, there's something you can do other than this. Menus can be fun. The secret is to have the menu system be interesting to use - responsive, good sound effects etc. You also want a high depth ceiling, so that the menu sings in the hand of an experienced user. Think of a game like Katamari Damacy, or the creator's following project: Noby Noby Boy. Both of these games focus on the joy of friction. Menus can be frictive and deep, and offer the immediate rewards of saving time, understanding the underlying system (i.e. combat), and making good party decisions.

You became "better"... factually so because a couple numbers or gauges ticked up a couple steps. Obviously this is a generalization and sometimes that feeling is totally valid, but sometimes it just seems like a cheap--maybe even manipulative--way of buying the player's attention and/or money.

Such tactics may be manipulative, but normally I think weak RPG mechanics are from designers who think they've implemented something good and haven't. I don't think these people are trying to be nefarious. Though I don't know how much better that makes things.

--

Blink, Photon, you guys are talking about balanced depth. That's like elegant design to programmers. Building depth and balancing it is one of those fundamental properties of good games... for both short-term and long-term decision making.

If you reward the player too much (with power) you break the game. If you reward the player too little you provide too small of an incentive.

[Photon]

Blink, Photon, you guys are talking about balanced depth. That's like elegant design to programmers. Building depth and balancing it is one of those fundamental properties of good games... for both short-term and long-term decision making.

If you reward the player too much (with power) you break the game. If you reward the player too little you provide too small of an incentive.

Right. And I think the interesting thing to note is how these mechanics, despite being shallow or game-breaking, still appear to have "inflated" (per "hardcore" gaming standards, let's call it for lack of better words) value.

Or do they? I suppose that really is the question we are getting at here. To look at things from another angle, one might argue that having contrast by using a tedious or repetitive task with a great (or even just good) reward enriches the end goal. The brand of "ultra-difficult" games I've seen on Flash portals, like MoneySeize for instance, seems to attest to this (personally I'm not the biggest fan of these though; not going to go into details right now.) Maybe this can be taken to "silly" proportions, but can it be done in moderation and what truly constitutes too much? Opinions seem to vary on this, solely based off of the popularity and feedback of aforementioned games.

[Graham-]

In RPGs you can grind for treasure. Go off the beaten path, fight more monsters, gain some extra xp, and get a secret item.