Why Grind? The psychology and culture of repetitive and uninteresting gameplay

A Warrior in WoW Classic runs through a field, culling the same pack of boars over and over again. A Lord of the Rings Online player slaves for hours trying to scrape out their next title. A Foxhole maniac hacks away at the mines, feeding the insatiable beast of the war machine.

The massively multiplayer experience as we have come to know it is, for better or for worse, inseparable from the ever-present phantom of the “grind”. From the earliest days of the MMORPG to the genre’s tumultuous present, gamers and outside observers alike have come to associate the MMO with unavoidable repetitive sequences that usually involve the player doing the same thing repeatedly again for many hours of play.

It’s a curious phenomenon, the near universality of grinding in MMOs. So many gamers use video games as an escape from the real world, as a chance to unwind and relax after a hard day’s work. And yet, gamers across the world willingly subject themselves to what seems (at least on the surface) like a repetitive slog that eerily resembles real life at times.

How did this become the norm? What is it that keeps players hooked on games even when much of the gameplay devolves into endless mining or repetitive mob killing? And whatever it is about the grind that we love so much, is this paradigm okay? Or is such game design irresponsible on the part of MMO developers?

A brief history of the grind

In their earliest days, video games were extremely low-fidelity products that didn’t offer much in comparison to the games of today. This is hardly a knock on the game developers of the 1970s; undeniably, that they were able to create games of any substance at all with machines like the Atari 2600 that had 128 bytes of RAM is remarkable. The fact of the matter, though, was that most of the earliest video games were very repetitive. This can’t really be counted as a true grind, though, as people played these simple games for their own enjoyment. They weren’t working towards anything when they