RESISTANCE - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 145

the same scenes can rapidly move the player toward the boredom corner of the diagram of
flow. Even so, rote plays a huge role in many digital games, and players are willing to put up
with a lot of rote punishments, especially if they've become emotionally invested in moving
through rote activities to tackle challenges again. Some players might be seeking the satis-
faction of overcoming what they couldn't before, while others might be eager to reach the
moments of reward that they're hoping lie beyond those challenges, and others still might just
be so used to rote actions that they don't mind the boredom.
Many digital games of recent decades use rote activity not just as a form of punishment, but as
a basic element of the resistance of the game. Even if the player hasn't made a mistake or died,
there's still a lot of rote activity—usually involving verbs that are easily mastered and challenges
that are easily overcome—that the player has to push through before reaching a more intense
experience of challenge or a moment of reward.
A certain breed of single-player digital role-playing games, exemplified by the many titles of
the Final Fantasy series, uses rote activities throughout. Although these activities are presented
as combat against a variety of monsters and enemies, most of the time the player can defeat
those enemies just by pressing the “attack” button over and over again. Even if that simple verb
isn't enough, the most the player has to do is use a slightly more advanced verb that involves a
limited resource, or understand a system of “weaknesses”—for example, fire-type monsters can
usually be defeated by using a “water-type” verb, which uses up an automatically replenishing
resource often called mana . Although there are verb-object relationships to learn here, they
quickly become rote, and the player is often called on to use them again and again.
Players refer to this kind of repeated rote activity as grinding : performing the same actions
again and again for the sake of reward. One of the hallmarks of this kind of role-playing game
is that the player can grind to accumulate resources that make her avatar more powerful—not
because the player herself is understanding the system more deeply or learning how and when
to use verbs, but simply because the numbers of resources are climbing. In some ways, the
choice to grind for more resources can be an interesting way to open up the space of resistance
in a game: if the player has a difficult challenge ahead of her in a role-playing game, she can
often invest time into grinding to boost her resource numbers, which will make that challenge
easier. For example, the player might accumulate enough experience points to level up and
increase her health resource, allowing her avatar to take more damage before dying. She might
also accumulate enough of a currency resource to purchase a new sword that uses the same
“attack” verb, but which can remove more of a monster's health.
By definition, because it involves rote activities, grinding takes time, not skill or understanding.
It's a player's choice whether to invest this time, but many grind-based games require a certain
amount of grinding just to get enough resources to proceed. Some grind games are all about
investing time to get more resources, such as the wildly popular Farmville (2009). Like role-
playing games, Farmville has multiple resources to increase and lets the player level up to access