On Game Design - Game Design Theory - page 48

or no risk and that results in an in-game reward. The most obvious and
well-known examples of grinding are those found in RPGs (particularly
Japanese RPGs), in which you can (and often have to ) fight low-level
monsters (who are no threat to you) over and over and over again to gain
experience points. But there are other examples in other genres, too: one
such example might be fetch quests, which have you run an item from
one place to another in-game. Almost all of the gameplay in Farmville
is pure grinding. The game tells you, “click on this thing for 300 points.�
here's no reason to not click on it, so it's just a chore the game makes
you do.
Grinding is bad for two reasons. First, it presents a false choice be-
cause you should grind your Pokémon up to level 99. There's no in-game
reason for you not to do that: it only benefits you. This leads to the sec-
ond reason, which is that you're motivating players to bore themselves .
In fact, you're using the player's boredom to counterbalance the tedium
of grinding. The thinking goes, “Well, players will become totally unbal-
anced after grinding for two hours, but they'll get bored before that.�
Perhaps this begs the question, why do so many games have grind-
ing if it's obviously such a bad thing? The answer is that grinding works .
The human mind is an archaic and exploitable thing, and our evolution-
ary imperatives are easily taken advantage of. Evolutionary needs, such
as the need to gather and the need to show status, are being exploited
when we're playing Pokémon , World of Warcraft , or slot machines. No
one finds grinding interesting; it is a compulsive behavior.
Game designs should never encourage people to do uninteresting
no-brainers once, let alone repeatedly, because games are about deci-
sions and building skills. Games can, and should, be making every effort
to enrich the lives of their players, and not simply suck their time away
from them.
Too Many Choices
The opposite of the false-choice problem (which is not having enough
choices) is to present the player with too many choices. Having too many
choices can be just as bad as having too few, and like so many other
things in life, this element of game design is a balancing act.
A very obvious example of a game with too many choices is when
your hand consists of 20 or more cards in Magic: The Gathering , but in
most cases it's not obvious when a game gives players too many choices.
The example from Magic: The Gathering seems obvious—it just feels like
too many choices for the player. But why? What's the harm in too many
choices?