Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
games where the space of resistance consists of exploring complex rules and choices, pushing
against challenges, and dealing with less rote punishments are used as a kind of resistance that
comes from the
frustration
side of the flow diagram. Grind-based gameplay, on the other hand,
involves resistance from the
boredom
side. And it's not hard to understand why many players
simply don't want to invest their time in activities that primarily challenge patience, endurance,
and the ability to sink many hours of time into a game.
Many game creators feel that using grinding is disrespectful of players' time. The popularity
of grinding in role-playing games, social games like
Farmville
, and increasingly in other game
genres might be the result of pressure from business managers and marketing strategies that
simply try to deliver more hours of gameplay or keep players around longer so that they'll
spend more money in free games where they can make purchases while playing. Along with
the lure of rewards, grinding can be abused in this way to create filler that doesn't do much to
enhance the conversation of gameplay.
On the other hand, some players genuinely enjoy challenges of patience, efficiency, and optimi-
zation; there's strategy involved in figuring out how to grind more effectively, wasting as little
time as possible, or even managing your own patience as you push through a boring kind of
resistance. If action-driven games sometimes resemble a complex obstacle course to navigate,
then grinding games involve something more like the endurance and sustained concentration
of a marathon. Different players enjoy different things—so beyond making a choice about what
kind of conversation you want to facilitate as a creator, the most important thing is to be honest
with players about what kind of resistance your game uses. Players who are looking for difficult
challenges or who want to measure their skill against competitors have every right to feel
betrayed if they find that a game's been packed with a lot of grind simply to make it longer!
One more shape of resistance deserves mention:
scoring
. It's neither a punishment nor a reward,
but a reflection of the player's experience. A player's score is sometimes revealed throughout
a game, as in classic arcade games where the score is displayed in a corner of the screen, often
going up steadily as play continues. As we discussed earlier, moments of punishment and
reward often happen at significant milestones in the ongoing conversation of a game, after the
player pushes through one chunk of the experience—or makes a fatal mistake that ends the
game! These moments are often used to reveal the player's score as well or focus the player's
attention on a score that's been present all along. It's the time in the conversation where the
participants check in about what's been said and determine how things have been going.
