So, there’s this guy at work who is a notorious grinder (oh, look, he’s playing Xbox Live Arcade games he doesn’t particularly like to raise his gamer score, right now!). He’s the kind of person who played Dark Age of Camelot before they quadrupled the leveling speed, and actually liked it. Because this is something that deserves to be mocked, I asked him if boring tasks were more rewarding than fun tasks. He said they weren’t, but that it was DIFFICULTY that made things more rewarding. But then, what makes something difficult, in a good way?

It’s not just about effort. Something can be very time consuming but not particularly difficult, such as slaughtering low level enemies without personal risk. It’s also not just about risk. Gambling money on a coin flip is plenty risky, but isn’t particularly difficult. The explanation he came up with is that something is difficult in a fun way (which I’m going to call “challenging”) if “it requires developing a skill to succeed”. This feels about right to me. Pressing a button and being randomly rewarded or punished isn’t difficult, but it sure is frustrating. If you show skill in defeating a boss, but it wasn’t actually needed, that isn’t difficult within the context of the game’s explicit goals. However, by setting higher standards for yourself, it becomes challenging again.

The obvious next question is: What’s so challenging about grinding, then? You repeatedly slaughter the same group of enemies with little thought or variation. Where’s the skill here? One answer is that the skills are higher up. The abilities to simultaneously play several games, or to develop the optimal way to increase leveling speed, or to create a complicated macro to avoid playing at all are skills in their own right. They may not be within the game design context created by the developers, but they’re skills. Grinding is about winning the metagame.

It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure I buy it. Why jump out of the game to the metagame in the first place? In the process of doing so, you miss out on a lot of the inherent challenge of a game. There can be just as much challenge and fun to be found by attempting the more difficult and interesting encounters within a game, but instead those are shunned for being too inefficient. Is it a rebellious streak? Do we generate more difficulty so the resulting rewards become more psychologically significant? Or is this all just a justification for seeking the approval of others? Whatever the reason, grinding is going to be around as long as games, and it seems like all we can do is try to make it less painful.

While I was browsing Joystiq a few days ago, I was directed to a few interesting articles on the subject of Grinding. Liz Lawley defended the merits of repetitive but rewarding play, while Tom Coates failed to figure out why he still plays games that aren’t fun. This started me thinking about fun, The Grind, and human psychology. The simple explanation is to say that everyone who continues to play an unfun game has an addiction that needs to be cured. The real explanation is far more complex, and lies at the heart of why MMOs, and games in general, are so damn compelling in the first place.

First, I realized that there are essentially two sets of reasons I play and enjoy games. These are more clusters of associated causes than anything cut and dry, but there are important distinctions to be made. The first category is roughly labeled as “Experiential”. This is largely equivalent to the poorly defined concept of “fun” that we in the games industry pretend to understand. Raph Koster and others have various theories about what fun is, and here’s mine. In essence, fun is in the direct emotional reactions to games. The emotional content of a game’s story, art, and music feed into this, as do the endorphins resulting from physical and mental exertion. I also include the basic joy of socializing in this category. Communicating with others is so central to us as humans that it can be a very direct and important factor in creating fun. Aesthetic masterpieces like Rez or atmosphere-based adventures like Resident Evil embody this experiential fun.

The other category is a bit harder to pin down, but I’m going to call it “Rewards”. Here lie things like high scores, tournament standings, character level, and real money. Why do these motivate us to play games just as much as the more directly emotional causes? Real-world money is a good place to start, because making money makes me happy. You may think this is because with I can purchase things that will make me happier, but it’s not that simple. Once people get above a certain basic level, having more money does not make people any happier on average. However, gaining money ALWAYS makes me happier. What’s going on here? The secret is that having money doesn’t make me inherently happy, but GAINING it does. It turns out that gaining meaningless points makes me happy in the same way that gaining more useful money does. Games like Diablo 2 or Progress Quest exemplify this category.

But why does gaining arbitrary, meaningless things make us so happy? This is something that economists and psychologists have been studying for hundreds of years. Personally, I think the best explanation comes from Evolutionary Psychology. Basically, gaining useless things makes us happy for the same reason eating chocolate does: we’re wired that way. In the case of eating chocolate, there is a fairly direct link between the taste buds and the “happiness generator” in your brain. Modern neuroscience can mostly explain this, but the joy of acquisition is a bit more complicated. The basic theory embodied in our brains is that anything gained now will open up future opportunities for direct enjoyment. To encourage us to gain and accomplish things, we eventually learned to get some of that happiness up front. Recently, the kinds of things we strive to gain have changed. In today’s world, there is no psychological difference between “real” money and in-game money. They’re both abstract counters that can be exchanged for goods and services, and the emotional bits of our brain can’t know the difference.

One thing to remember is that the relative importances of Fun and Reward depend heavily on the individual player. Personally, games tend to bore me to death if they lack any compelling and immediate fun. On the other hand, many of my friends refuse to play games that aren’t competitive. In terms of genres, MMORPGs lean heavily towards reward. Everything you do is tracked, ranked, and rewarded. Single player RPGs share these features (ever grind to max level in a Final Fantasy game?), but MMORPGs up the ante by adding social elements. By living in a massive world with thousands of players you can constantly compare yourself to other players. The only thing better than gaining abstract rewards is gain more than someone else! This is why PvP in MMORPGs always devolves into ganking: the abstract reward of being better than someone else is perceived to be greater than the fun of a close and fair fight. This finally brings us to a definition of grinding: it’s when players repeatedly perform a somewhat painful action in order to acquire an abstract reward.

To draw some sort of conclusion from all this, the secret to a compelling game is to balance experiential fun and rewards. If a game is fun but has a shallow reward structure, it will only be compelling for a few months at most. If a game is not fun but has expertly crafted rewards, it will never get enough casual players to achieve mainstream success. In my opinion, City of Heroes is lacking in compelling rewards (we’re working on it), and the Everquest series is lacking in fun. World of Warcraft seems to hit the best mix of the two, and that is why it’s been so annoyingly successful. In the early levels, things are fun because of exploration, combat, and socializing. At the high levels, the game shifts to a heavy focus on high-investment raids and epic rewards. The mix of players complement each other, and provide an enjoyable experience for everyone on the spectrum from fun to grind. I’m not sure if this design was on purpose, but the rest of us can definitely learn from its success.

Some interesting news came out out Microsoft’s Gamefest on Sunday. Microsoft is opening up the Xbox 360 to hobbyist developers. Here’s the Press Release, the surprisingly informative FAQ, and the Developer’s Blog. In case you don’t want to read through all that, here’s a summary:

• Microsoft will release XNA Express, which is a no-cost development tool for creating managed-code (aka .net, aka C#) non-commercial games for Windows
• For $99 a year, you can compile and run your managed code on a retail Xbox 360
• Anything you create can only be run by others paying $99 a year, unless you upgrade to the pro version.

This is the most comprehensive official console homebrew system since the failed Net Yaroze for the PS1. The Net Yaroze was expensive (required a special $750 console), hampered by the a poor development environment, and limited to a maximum game size of 4mb. For these reasons, XNA is probably going to fare better:

• Microsoft is generally good at crafting development environments. By all accounts, the professional Xbox 360 environment is easier to use than the PS3 one, and I doubt the new XNA environment will be significantly worse.
• $99 a year is a somewhat reasonable price. Comparatively, setting up homebrew on a Nintendo DS requires about $100 of hardware and the fun of waiting for shipments from China.
• This encourages C# development. People may start out writing emulators and media players, but these same developers will in theory be encouraged to write their important future projects in C#. Or, they may just go write more emulators
• When people inevitably develop the pirate-enabling software that came out for the original Xbox, Microsoft will be getting $99 a year from whoever wants to run it

An interesting angle is the impact on attempts to hack the 360. Up until now, there has been no way to run unsigned code. Now there’s a clear, official way to do it. But, the only code you can run is theoretically secure managed code. One of Microsoft’s biggest selling points for C# is that buffer overruns and exploits just don’t happen, and this will be a test of that. My prediction is that there WILL be flaws in the C# libraries, and the console WILL be cracked, but it could be worse. The application that starts the unsigned code is protected using Microsoft’s DRM, so whenever a flaw is detected, they can force everyone to update their C# libraries. What this means is that there are only 2 ways to permanently crack a 360:

1. Find a unique exploit and not report it. This seems somewhat unlikely given the structure of the console hacker community
2. Find an exploit that is severe enough to allow access to modify the bios/code/whatever to disable signed code checks. Then, you can never connect to Xbox Live again. This is potentially doable, but very difficult

Basically, I think this is a great move for Microsoft, although not for the hardcore homebrewers and console hackers. By providing this authorized and neutered method to run homebrew programs on the 360, Microsoft gets people to pay $99 a year for something that was free on the original Xbox. As a bonus, the particularly damaging hacks, such as pirating games, are more difficult with this new system. Because Microsoft is offering this, people are less likely to put in the extra effort to truly open up the entire console for exploitation. This means less freedom and fun for hardcore hackers and poor college students, but a better chance of success.

Finally, I’m interested to see what the other console giants will do in response, if anything. Nintendo, I’m looking at you. I need to write my competitive hand-waving game, and you’d better let me. I expect no less, now.