Mention the concept of “grinding” in a room full of gamers, and you are liable to get one of two reactions: either some titters of excitement, or a cacophonous mix of sighs and groans.  There are, in my experience, very few people who respond to the idea of the grind with simple ambivalence.

Grinding, in traditional gaming terms, stems from RPGs where the player has to fight battle after battle in order to gain experience and level up before being able to proceed further in the game (think of the original Final Fantasy and the huge jump in difficulty when moving from one area into the next). In more general terms, grinding is any time the player engages in a repetitive activity for the purpose of gaining some sort of reward (think brewing hundreds of potions in Oblivion to become a better alchemist). 

For most gamers, the grind is a hated thing – an obstacle between them and the rest of the game.  Even for those that grew up with it, the idea of having to stop forward progression in a game to go and kill wave after wave of sewer rats is a generally repugnant one.  Many view its continued existence as a sure-fire sign of bad game design.

On the other hand, there are those gamers that love and embrace the grind, who look forward to a chance to pull and claw their way to whatever desired reward it is they are after.  They are the ones who think that an afternoon spent gathering ore to churn out twenty or fifty pieces of armor in WoW sounds like an excellent plan.  To them, grinding is the road to greater glory, be it levels, achievements, or what have you.

From a game design perspective, it is important to isolate exactly what constitutes grinding and what doesn’t.  The way I see it, any actions that take place during the normal course of progression through a game cannot be considered grinding, even if they are repetitive.  Fighting random encounters every five steps in a JRPG may suck (and may be a different design issue), but if you only have to do it once on your way through the dungeon, it can’t really be considered grinding.  On the other hand, if you get to the end of the aforementioned dungeon only to find out that you are ten levels below where you need to be, and have to repeat that same trek multiple times just to be able to move forward, now you’ve entered the realm of the grind.

The first real encounter with grinding that I can recall was in Final Fantasy IV (not counting hiring and killing doctors in Mars Saga on the C64, which didn’t register to me as grinding at the time…).  I had been proceeding through the game relatively smoothly, with the occasional difficult boss fight.  It was when I reached the underground world, though, with its caves filled with pools of acid (or whatever it was supposed to be) that things came to a screeching halt.  Walking through the caves did huge amounts of damage, and I was finding it impossible to proceed.  After stealthily taking a peek at the hint guide in the local Electronics Boutique, I discovered that I needed to use the Float spell to bypass these areas.  The problem was, I didn’t have the Float spell.  And, according to the book, I wasn’t going to be getting it for six or seven more levels.

At that point, I had little choice but to wander back and forth across the rocky plains of the underground, fighting imp after imp, slowly building up Rosa to the desired level.  All I knew was that I was frustrated; I’d been moving through the game, I was engrossed in the story, and now here I was spending what felt like hours fighting the same battles over and over again.  Though I didn’t know it as grinding at the time, I certainly knew I didn’t like it.

During the following years, I learned to recognize the grind and come to dread it.  In my experiences, JRPGs were the biggest culprits, but Western RPGs were not completely without guilt.  In hindsight, the grinding in JRPGs seemed all the more odious most likely due to their comparative linearity.  Making your way through the story, hitting a section where you were under-leveled meant you were stuck until you ground your way through.  In comparison, the western RPGs I was playing during those same years were more open, meaning that if I couldn’t beat Witch Mountain in Wizardry VII, I could head off to Munkharama to explore and gain experience without feeling like the story had ground to a halt.

Over the years, the differences in structure between Western and JRPGs may have blurred a bit, but the grinding is usually still there in both, and these days even non-RPGs have fallen victim to the occasional grind.  At the same time, MMOs have risen in prominence, and they currently sit as the undisputed kings of grinding.  So, with the grind still persisting even after all these years, the question remains: is grinding always a sign of bad design?

I think it comes down to how well the aspects of grinding are integrated (or not) into the game.  A lot of this often comes down to whether the grinding falls under being required or being optional.  In Persona 3, for instance, there were multiple occasions where upon reaching the boss of a floor, it was necessary to head back and churn out a few more levels before being able to face them.  In comparison, in Persona 4 I generally found that if I fought most of the random battles on my normal progression through the dungeons, I was at a suitable level to face the bosses upon first arrival.

In this case, Persona 3 was demonstrating some classic signs of “required” grinding, in that there was no way I could proceed with the story without first leveling up more.  What makes this bad design is that, optimally, the game should have the player arrive at the end point of a sequence with enough experience to make moving on to the next area possible.  This is something that Persona 4 corrects.  Now, that is not to say that the player should be able to easily handle whatever boss awaits, but that they should at least feel like they have a fighting chance based on their current level.  If they want to make things easier on themselves by going back and leveling up even more, then that becomes optional grinding, and is their own decision.

Now, required grinding isn’t always indicative of bad design: take Etrian Odyssey, for example. In this instance, I would argue that the very foundation of the game is the concept of the grind, and so while it is required, it is not necessarily bad design.  If you are not interested in a slow-paced dungeon crawl, gathering crafting components and leveling up skills, you probably wouldn’t have ever picked up the game in the first place.  The same can be said for Torchlight or Diablo or any other number of similar dungeon hacks.  When the grind is a fundamental element of the game’s design, the player is fully aware of what they are getting into; it may be required, but it is also expected.

In general, if the grind exists as an obstacle to player advancement in an effort to pad out play time, it’s probably bad design.  If it sticks out as something peripheral to the main gameplay elements, it’s probably bad design.  And, in general, it is poorly designed grinding that most people hate.

On the other side of things are the optional grinds; things that the player can choose to do to improve their position in the game, or to earn additional awards.  Breeding multiple generations of Buizels and leveling them up to craft the perfect move set backed up by the perfect stats in Pokemon takes an awful lot of time, but it’s not something you have to do to win the game.  It’s for people who want to put in the effort, who enjoy the challenge of creating that perfect fighting machine.  Achievements in many games are an example of optional grinding; it might take me a really long time to deal one million points of fire damage in Team Fortress 2, but it’s something I can choose to do with no consequence to my overall enjoyment of the game.

So while there are probably always going to be a split of opinions as to whether grinding is something to be despised or embraced, there are some pretty basic rules developers can keep in mind to help minimize its bad points.  Harnessed poorly, the grind can be a huge stumbling block to enjoying a game – harnessed properly, it can actually be a pretty rewarding mechanic for players who want to put forth the effort.