The Grind... Once an Addiction, Now a Pain in the Ass!
Back in the 'Good Old Days'...
Time was that 'the grind' - in whatever game - was an enjoyable part of my gaming 'career'. But that I consider gaming as a 'career' hints at what one of the main problems with the whole tiresome slog is.
There should be no way that anyone - other than a truly professional gamer - should see what is supposed to be an entertainment as a 'career'. Yet, when I was younger, that is exactly how it felt for my friends and myself.
Through the day we all had our jobs, but on an evening (and weekends) our time was turned over to our gaming addiction. I was a member of a competitive gaming clan and so believe me when I said that involvement in this level of gaming got pretty serious (my job was just a job, but involvement in a clan was 'my life')!
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| Above: One of the other unhealthy aspects of being a fanatical gamer - the infamous 'LAN Parties'! Packing our PC gear into a mate's car to attend a weekend of unbridled gaming, eating and drinking! |
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| Above: While this post mainly discusses the negative mental health aspects of habitual computer gaming, there is also a physical impact as well. Above represents a snap shot of some of the questionable 'fuel intake' that keeps a 48 hour LAN party going! Including the host fitting actual beer pumps in the gaming room... The smell still lingers with me! |
Day in and day out I dedicated allotted time to do things like *training*, turning up for clan matches, giving up time to run clan operations (I headed up my clan's 'Call of Duty' section and was responsible for recruiting and the training of it's members). This meant a LOT of game time...
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| Above: Back in early 2009 I finally made CoD Gunnery Sergeant, boy - what a grind that was as a mediocre player!  |
In the end, however, the strain began to show and the amount of time I devoted to 'the clan' began to conflict when my the relationship with my partner started to get serious (I'm sure there is a diagram here somewhere that plots the obsession with gaming and being single versus a decline in interest in gaming coupled with a real relationship). 😆
At some point something had to give, and it did... I left that clan.
Withdrawal Symptoms...
However, like coming off any other drug or addiction there were side effects. For me, my 'methadone' was 'the grind'. The insidious part of computer gaming designed to keep a player hooked and playing by dangling 'rewards' in front of them which they can 'win' if only they would play enough.
The prime example in the sort of gaming that I played - online military first person shooters - was the work that a player did to upgrade to better weapons or character attributes. In Battlefield 2 the committed player spent an inordinate amount of time 'ranking up' their character and equipping them with ever more powerful kit in order to attain a competitive edge in gaming.
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| Above: 'We don't need no stinkin' badges!' Er, yes we do! Battlefield 2 had a plethora of upgrade goals to grind. Gotta catch 'em all! 😉 |
In our competitive clan - we played against other clans and entered national and even inter-national leagues - we expected a player who wanted to join our competition team to have attained a certain level or gaming rank and have access to specific in-game kit that would be useful to the team.
To help new players along, we ran training and 'B' team leagues to get the less experienced up to our 'A team' level, and a big part of this included 'the grind'.
Players would play, play and play again to 'farm' the points that they needed to progress up the character/class levels or to attain the points required to boost their weapon inventory or capabilities. There were literally days when all I did was to repeatedly play the same series of game maps again and again and again just to boost my in-game character's - hopefully game winning - attributes.
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| Above: My Battlefield 2 'awards' in 2009. And I wrote at the time: "LMAO --- or too much time on my hands (many a late night and all day game session there. To be fair, I was involved with a couple of UK game clans and played competitively - [OBC] and then [RIP], you soon rack up the hours played when you get into a clan (like it or not)." |
Indeed, there were even special games servers set up specifically to make 'farming' points easier or which focused on very specific player attributes... Needing that knife fighting badge, join the 'Knives Only Server'!
Now, officially, farming like this was frowned upon, especially when it promoted the very shady practise of collaboration. For example, certain skill upgrades were quite difficult to achieve on 'normal' play - take that knife fighting skill, yes you could grind that in the course of normal play, but that might take you a very long time (especially if you were a mediocre player). AND SO... You could join certain servers - sometimes with a friend who also wanted that particular skill - and blatantly stab each other until you both achieved the required quota of knife kills to gain the reward (a badge, level or points or whatever)
Very shady, as I said. But such was the incentive for player to 'get better' at the game that they would spend the amount of time needed to juice their game character in order to eek out every game advantage that they could... It was obsessive to the point that it truly was an addiction.
Going Over to the Dark Side...
As negative and unhealthy as this sounds, there was nothing that broke game rules here (although farming servers were frowned upon). Indeed, that games and their developers encouraged this sort of intensive play and built these 'levelling up' systems into the games precisely to hook players to their games.
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| Above: Sometimes the drive for achievements led to some regrettable rewards! Bad Company 2. |
However, the rather obvious result of the obsession with becoming 'the best player' was that some players took that extra step from game exploitation (bending the rules) to become out and out cheaters.
I won't go into the myriad of ways that players could cheat the system, but 'farming' was just the very thin end of the wedge that led the unscrupulous first to 'the exploit' and then - eventually - to 'the hack'.
Farming was seen - by the players - as a 'harmless' pastime which 'was the developers fault anyway as they were encouraging the focus on levelling up' (players would say). But, this was very analogous to taking 'soft drugs', as for those with a compulsive personality - and these were the days before 'OCD' was a generally recognised 'thing' - it was a slippery slope to 'harder' things.
The first signs that you 'had a problem' was the lengths that you would go t 'the grind'...
In 2014 I wrote: "The trickiest assignment over the past couple of weeks has got to have been the 'Middle King' assignment. To complete this you first have to unlock the SUAV - a miniature unmanned reconnaissance drone - by completing the 'Safe Riding' assignments and then use it to make a 'kill'. This turned out to be something like a bizarre game of long-range darts as you have to guide the little plane towards an unsuspecting target and then mow the victim down without him simply sidestepping your attempted assassination!
Eventually, more by luck than skill I decapitated an unwary victim which - it has to be said - was a little hilarious as being killed by a SUAV is more than a little lame and humiliating!" This took me 10 hours.
As I said, I personally lost whole days - and by days I mean 24 hour sessions at my computer - where I just performed a specific task or series of tasks - perhaps on very specific maps - just to 'win' the amount of XP or points that I required to get to the next level, or next rank, or get that better gun OR something completely insane like 'a scope' or a skin!
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| Above: Preparing for 'The Grind'! A typical 'Game Day' back in 2009, I would book a day off work (regularly) to spend a whole day in front of the computer and 'live blog' my progress to journal my 'achievements' (I believe this was a 'ARMA II' day)! |
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| Above: Laughably, no game exemplified the insane adherence to immersion than ARMA II, a game which was legendary for taking mundane or repetitive undertakings in a war game to extreme levels. Drive across a huge island in real time? No problem. 'It was real, man!' |
But while games like ARMA II simply illustrated the mad extremes which some players were willing to go in their complete immersion in a game - and so were 'grindy' in the way they turned humdrum and prosaic game actions into compulsive obsessive behaviour - the real grind was in games where the deep mechanics were designed to illicit a almost robotic captive state that a player found hard to break.
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| Above: What grind? (Excuse the pun.) Possibly the most grindy game out there - World of Tanks pulls the player ever more deeply into the quest for a better tank, the trick being that this is slyly accompanied with and insidious financial model that encourages 'pay to win'. The above pic represents my 2 year grind up the Soviet tank tree. |
Object 268. The yellow dotted line kinda represents how far you can reasonably play
the game 'free' before it becomes a little harder to compete seriously without
out and out have to pay for! Gold ammo cost money too.
That the developers were knowingly complicate in designing game which encouraged addictive behaviour is undeniable, and it - in turn - led the game companies to find newer and even more addictive mechanisms to include in the games to maintain an increasing 'buzz'...
This - in short - eventually resulted in the whole loot box scandal...
"The loot box scandal involves concerns about the potential harms of loot boxes, including gambling-related issues, mental health problems, and financial harm."
The issue was taken so seriously that in 2022 the UK Government formed a study group to investigate the practise and it issued a report that - while not recommending an out-right ban of the 'loot box' - it would work with the video game industry to improve protections for players.
I'm Outa Here...
Luckily for me, at some point in the mid 2000s my interests shifted from computer gaming to my girlfriend, the two being too time intensively incompatible! 😂
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| Above: And just when you think you have successfully achieved all your gaming goals in one game (Battlefield 2) along comes another (Battlefield 3) and off we go again! |
Something had to go, and it was intensive gaming.
While I have - obviously - carried on with my computer gaming it is nowadays more of an occasional pastime. I have other hobbies - like my model making - which provide me with a bit of that OCD fix that I still crave, but these are strictly governed by how much my now wife will let me spend - financially and time wise - on them.
To be honest, at 62 I feel a little too tired to spend the time to be too obsessed by anything - except a nice knap - and I am lucky if I can last to the end of a long movie without starting to fall asleep! 😆
The days of the 'Game Day' are long behind me, and 'The Grind' is something I just cannot seem to gather the energy to do any more. This became very obvious when I realised just how much grinding was required in my latest gave, World War Z.
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| Above: My character's primary weapon is the shotgun so this is the weapon tree I'm currently working on - the combat shogun category. The irony is, each 'skin' adds a modest accessory which gives some slight improvement to basic weapon. |
My daughter and I now meet up just once a week for some online gaming and we bought WWZ as it seemed to be just the sort of zombie shooter that we like. But we were somewhat confused by what seemed an overly complicated and confusing character building and weapons system, so I spend a small amount f time looking into it... And wouldn't you guess it, it's a grind trap!
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| Above: Another type of grinding in World War Z are the class perks. You can only chose ONE perk from each vertical column to build your character's attributes. Each cost valuable game 'coin'. Sadly, I did not understand the system so bought *everything* as I went along! This was a complete waste of 'yellow coins' and added to the grind! |
...And as much as I am enjoying the game, and am kinda wanting to improve my character, I just cannot be assed to make the commitment to the time to go down that route anymore.
For me, the grinding is over.
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